INDIANAPOLIS — Ten women and six men have been chosen to view the evidence presented in the Delphi murders trial.
Over the past few days, they've viewed horrific crime scene photos from the day Abby Williams and Libby German were found murdered, some of the jurors growing emotional and visibly disturbed by some of the images.
And while 13News legal expert Katie Jackson-Lindsay thinks jurors exposed to any sort of brutal imagery should be offered therapy, it's not always practical to do so.
"There are so many boundaries in terms of a criminal prosecution or a criminal case that neither side want to give the appearance of offering anything to the jury in order to get a favorable verdict, so you have to be very careful about that, and even the court has to be very careful about that to ensure they're staying within the confines of the rules," Jackson-Lindsay said.
Jackson-Lindsay said throughout her career, jurors have come up to her after a trial, expressing the impact either the testimony or graphic evidence has had on them.
"In this case, we're seeing crime scene photos, we're seeing autopsy pictures, but in a lot of homicide cases, you're seeing actual body-worn camera footage of the body right there on the scene before any medical intervention is offered or the body is collected, and so that can have an equally or more traumatizing affect," Jackson-Lindsay said.
According to the National Center for State Courts, Alaska and Texas are the only states to offer therapy to jurors.
Sharon Sedwick helped pass the law in Texas. She said her daughter, Jennifer Cave, was shot and stabbed before her body was mutilated in 2005. After the trial ended for the two people who killed her daughter, Sedwick would go on to champion legislation in her daughter's name that offers therapy to jurors exposed to brutal imagery.
"I watched those jurors every day to see what kind of changes and see how they were reacting to what we were going through, and I just saw them withering on the vine, and I knew I owed them a great thank you for looking at those pictures and making the decisions that they made," Sedwick said.
Since the start of the trial, Special Judge Frances Gull, who is presiding over the Delphi trial, has stated she would monitor the jurors to ensure they were OK emotionally, and if not, she would call a recess or end court for the day.