When Fran Melmed was called to jury duty this year, she considered not showing up. Between 2009 and 2011, she’d served as a juror during two separate homicide trials. One involved the death of a 15-year-old boy; the other was death by stomping. Both ended with guilty verdicts. Both “linger with me to this day,” she says.

Still, she answered the court’s summons in November, hoping she wouldn’t get chosen to serve again.

“It felt like stress was radiating from my body because I didn’t want to get picked,” Melmed says. “I couldn’t get out of fight or flight mode.”

Melmed was chosen for a civil jury trial, and afterwards, with the urging of Jury Commissioner Patrick Martin, she sought advice from the newly launched Post-Trial Support for Jurors program.

During the 30-minute phone call, Melmed’s counselor talked with her about mindful breathing and walked through a visualization exercise that could help calm her if she’s called for jury duty again.

“She was fantastic,” Melmed says. “I felt supported, and I felt heard and I think both of those things are important as part of the process of jury service.”

So, too, does Jury Commissioner Martin.

“We’re bringing random people off the street: librarians, teachers, plumbers, who may not realize what they’re getting into, and we hit them with this,” Martin says.“We ask a lot of our jurors, and I feel like they’re an afterthought.”

“Psychological first aid”

Developed in partnership with West Chester University Community Mental Health Services, the program connects jurors in post-trial distress with the university’s Community Mental Health Service for“psychological first aid,” the type of post-incident treatment available to first responders. Program participants are offered three, free 30-minute support conversations with a post-doc or doctoral student.

Since the program’s launch eight months ago, seven people have used it. All reported feeling better after a single conversation without any follow ups.

An average of one person each month using the service? That’s good work, Martin says.

“Some people might say, That’s a lot of work just for 12 people. To which I say, “What are you, crazy? The program was available to help 12 people,” Martin says, projecting a full year’s count.

Michele Pole, Director of Community Mental Health Services, manages the program on the university’s end, working with the students, mostly PhD candidates, who talk to the jurors.

“It’s not treatment. It’s a support approach,” Pole says. “It’s providing psychological first aid, helping folks identify what they need in the moment and helping them find ways to meet their needs within their community.”

“I mean, you’re deciding something incredibly important. You’re talking about two people’s lives, one who was murdered, and (another) who is on trial to be judged. You want to get it right, and that in and of itself is stressful. Then there’s the facts of the case, including how people were murdered.” — Fran Melmed

Vicarious trauma

Eleven million Americans report for jury duty every year, according to 2023 numbers from the Conference of State Court Administrators. A January 2025 article from the Houston State University Crime Victims Institute concluded that “jury service comes with the risk of varying amounts of stress due to the weightiness of the tasks, most notably in trials involving disturbing evidence, hostile deliberation environments, and high-profile cases.”

In the field, that’s called “vicarious trauma,” which the Cleveland Clinic defines as “the experience of absorbing others’ pain in times of their murder or sexual abuse, especially when children are involved, can be particularly challenging.”

Martin first realized the tremendous negative impact a trial could have on jurors when, as a court employee in 2013, he sat through the trial of Dr. Kermit Gosnell, who performed abortions at all stages of pregnancy from a West Philadelphia clinic.

Along with the jurors, Martin listened to testimony detailing how the doctor cut the spinal cords of living babies. He watched the jurors’ faces when shown photos of aborted fetuses stuffed in refrigerated cat food containers.

He knew police officers, court employees, even judges and lawyers, have organizations they could turn to if they felt a case affected their mental health, but jurors did not. (Although in this case, the judge arranged to have mental health professionals available to talk to those upset by the experience.)

He walked away thinking: “We should offer that service to every juror after every trial.”

The serious business of jury duty

A case doesn’t have to be as awful as Gosnell’s to affect jurors. In November, Melmed was a juror on a personal injury case in civil court. Some members of the jury, especially those who had never served before, “were really struggling about making sure they were doing the right thing,” she says.

“There are all kinds of jokes about being on a jury, but in all three experiences I’ve had, the jurors take their job seriously. We know what’s being asked of us, and we try really hard to work together. I haven’t been on a jury where people just phoned it in.”

When Melmed was a juror on the murder trials, her stressors included being unable to talk about the case to get emotional support and feeling isolated. She sometimes felt overwhelmed by thoughts of the case while raising her young children.

“I mean, you’re deciding something incredibly important. You’re talking about two people’s lives, one who was murdered, and (another) who is on trial to be judged. You want to get it right, and that in and of itself is stressful,” she says. “Then there’s the facts of the case, including how people were murdered.”

Some jurors also report having lingering bad feelings because of interactions with other jurors during deliberations or after casting a vote on guilt. Sometimes even showing up for jury service can be a stressor, even for someone new to the pro.

“It may be navigating Center City or sitting in traffic on 95. Am I going to be able to pick up my kids on time? Are they going to charge me?’” Martin says.

“It’s not treatment. It’s a support approach. It’s providing psychological first aid, helping folks identify what they need in the moment and helping them find ways to meet their needs within their community.” — Michele Pole, Director of Community Mental Health Services

An established model

To develop a care option for jurors, Martin borrowed liberally from an existing juror support program established in Massachusetts about a decade ago. The programs are nearly identical in how they operate, requiring a juror in distress to call a hotline and leave a message and a counselor returns the call. One difference is that Massachusetts’ program is in partnership with a nonprofit mental health services provider (as opposed to a university).

Pamela J. Wood, Jury Commissioner for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, says their juror counseling program is utilized by 12 people annually, an average of one per month. Some months will have no calls. Others are particularly active: After one homicide trial Wood could only describe as both gruesome and grueling, four or five of the jurors who heard the case called the counseling service.

One Massachusetts juror called the counseling program from the courthouse steps not long after the verdict was read. When a mental health professional returned the call, Wood says, the man said, “‘I felt better as soon as I left the message,’” and declined further conversations.

Some might argue that meant the program was unnecessary. Wood says that interaction supports the program’s value. It’s further buttressed by the responses to post-jury service surveys her office collects. Simply knowing the program exists reassures people, Wood says.

Most callers seem to get what they need with a single phone call, Wood says. She knows of only a single juror, whose trial involved child sexual abuse, who used all three phone sessions.

She also knows firsthand how taxing jury duty can be. A few years ago, she was on a federal jury hearing a civil rights case involving abuse of a locked-up prisoner by guards.

“I was surprised at how stressful I found it, and I’m a professional in this business, so I sort of knew what to expect,” she says. “I knew what would be asked of me, but sitting there and thinking, Oh gosh, one of these sides is lying, and we’re going to have to decide who we think is lying and come back into this courtroom and say who that is … That’s a lot of responsibility to put on someone.”

But if she had felt the need to talk to someone after the trial, she knew there was one available through the Federal Occupational Health Employee Assistance Program.

A personal approach

Haley LeFevre, a second year Doctoral Student Clinical Psychology at West Chester University, has spoken to two former Philadelphia jurors. During both conversations, she encouraged the callers to consider self-care coping strategies: Someone who is feeling anxious or panicky might benefit from calming the nervous system using progressive muscle relaxation or diaphragmatic breathing. Someone feeling a bit dissociated may center themselves by evaluating their environment, counting off five things they can see, five things they can hear, and the same for smell and touch.

“They really just need a person who’s going to listen to them and normalize their experiences,” LeFevre says. “There’s a lot of validation that it’s normal to experience a high degree of stress after getting information about a court case that can be overwhelming.”

The program is a win for Pole’s students and Martin’s jurors. The jurors get needed services. The students earn clinical hours. Other counties — including Chester, Montgomery, and Delaware — have expressed interest in the program.

Bedford County Court Administrator Mary Wilt said the idea for offering juror support had arisen before, but the lack of resources made it impossible. West Chester University’s willingness to work with other Pennsylvania counties means Bedford County’s costs are minimal beyond printing the brochures.

“We know that during the trial, the jurors are very focused on the facts of the case. Then they leave here and a week or a month [later], they start to think about things that happened during the trial, whether it’s something they heard or maybe something that they saw. We’re just trying to tell them that there are tools that can help process those thoughts and feelings.”

Martin describes his job as “all things jury,” from mailing summonses to greeting potential jurors. He takes the care of jurors very seriously. That personal email he sent to Melmed after her jury service? He does that for every juror an email, calling them by name, thanking them for their service, and reminding them of the jury support program.

Another employee asked Martin why he didn’t send a generic email to everyone and BCC it. Martin says he has no plan to change his current routine.

“Just feeling like someone cares, that feels good,” Martin says.

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