Judge and jury

Claire Baylis studied law, became a university lecturer, and researched the secret world of juries. Now, she’s brought together all these experiences in her first novel, the frighteningly realistic courtroom thriller Dice, that forces readers to confront uncomfortable questions. Mike White talks to Baylis, and asks whether she’d want to be tried by a jury.

Claire Baylis remembers the moment so clearly. Sitting in the public gallery at Rotorua’s High Court, she was watching the trial of five people charged with murder and horrific abuse of three-year-old Nia Glassie.

As a crucial piece of evidence was revealed, Baylis glanced over at the jury box, and saw one juror wasn’t paying any attention at all.

“And I remember feeling quite upset about that, and thinking, ‘This is awful. How can we rely on juries?’”

But then she started to realise how hard it must have been for these 12 people who answered a jury summons only to find themselves spending a month listening to the most horrendous details – how Nia had been beaten repeatedly, spun in a clothes dryer on hot for 30 minutes, held over a fire, pushed into piles of rubbish, and hurled against a wall.

They were just people effectively plucked off the street who had jobs they’d been forced to abandon, kids’ routines to wrangle, daily dramas of their own to cope with.

And here they were, required to sit through a catalogue of cruelty, an inventory of inexplicable human evil, then dispassionately assess guilt.

What a shit of a job, Baylis began thinking to herself.

The reason Baylis was in court that day in 2008 was because she was contemplating writing a novel about a defence lawyer.

But her experience in those weeks, and a chance meeting shortly afterwards, took her down a different track, and has ultimately led to a very different book, Dice, which is published this week.

Baylis, 56, had always wanted to write.

The daughter of two journalists, whose father, Geoff, became editor of The Dominion and The Listener, she was surrounded by words.

Her parents would read to Baylis and her brother constantly, and record these sessions to play on long car trips.

“From seven, I wanted to write stories. I probably always thought I wanted to write novels.”

There were teenage journals, and short stories she never quite finished.

Then career called, and in the late 80s, Baylis studied law at Victoria University, eventually becoming a lecturer there for 12 years.

The urge to write never dissipated, however, and in 1994 she did a course in original composition at Victoria University, along with Catherine Chidgey, Alison Wong and Kate Camp, who all went on to become successful authors.

“We were such babies then!” remembers Chidgey, who has twice won New Zealand’s top fiction award.

“I remember thinking that Claire had the X-factor, and I knew she'd write a kick-ass novel.

“For a long time afterwards, a group of us continued to meet, often at her house in Miramar, to share bits of our work in progress.”

Baylis carried on writing while lecturing law.

There was a nearly-finished novel about two friends travelling in Cental America.

There was another manuscript set on a West Coast farm.

There were rejections, which she stubbornly ignored, and imperfect drafts stuffed into office drawers to be resurrected at some future juncture of inspiration and energy.

There were also positive reactions, and the possibility of publication, but ultimately nothing that quite got her books over the line.

Inevitably, there were moments when Baylis thought she wasn't good enough, and should give up.

In 2002, she left her law lecturing life, and shifted to Rotorua, with the aim of concentrating on her writing, while raising three children.

And that’s when she ended up in the town’s High Court, listening to harrowing and horrific details of how a family tortured and killed a child.

Not long afterwards, former university colleagues Yvette Tinsley and Warren Young were in Rotorua, and caught up with Baylis for dinner.

They told her they were part of a trans-Tasman study on juries, and Baylis mentioned how the difficult job of jurors had been brought home to her as she sat through the Nia Glassie trial.

Hearing this, Tinsley and Young realised Baylis would be the perfect person to interview jurors, and coopted her to help with their study.

So for the next few years, Baylis sat through a variety of trials, then spoke with jurors to learn about their experience, and how well they understood the evidence and fundamental concepts of justice.

In doing so, she was given an extremely rare window into a world sealed off from public scrutiny, despite juries’ pivotal role, and despite numerous questions about their efficacy.

Then she heard about Victoria University’s PhD in creative writing, which marries writing a novel, or similar, with academic research about the novel’s issues.

And suddenly Baylis saw an opportunity to blend her work interviewing jurors, with a novel about what can happen in a courtroom.

For her PhD, Baylis concentrated on sexual violence cases, analysing juror responses, while at the same time writing a fictional account of a trial, set in Rotorua.

Dice is the story of four teenagers who create a game where the participants have to carry out sexual acts on specific girls, all based on the roll of a dice.

But the story is told through the eyes of the jurors who have been chosen to decide if the teens are guilty or not.

“I’ve always been interested in books that had different perspectives,” says Baylis, “and I found juries so fascinating.”

While the characters and scenario are completely invented, Baylis was able to draw on the experiences, reactions, and failings of jurors she spoke with.

Dice isn’t Twelve Angry Men refreshed, or To Kill a Mockingbird reimagined in tourist-town New Zealand with scents of sulphur and teen spirit.

It’s a powerful and challenging depiction of a crime, and the almost impossible task of average citizens trying to divine the truth.

Yvette Tinsley, a professor at Victoria University who supervised Baylis’s PhD research and followed the novel’s progress, says everything in Dice could, and probably has, happened in New Zealand jury rooms.

“Yes, it’s fiction, but the great gift Claire’s got is she really does inhabit the skin of those characters.”

Dice raises numerous unsettling and difficult issues. What disagreeable preconceptions do jurors bring to the courtroom? Does fretting about the potential of a long jail sentence lead to acquittals?

How much compromise and “horse-trading” goes on during jury deliberations in an effort to reach a verdict?

And how well do jurors understand legal basics such as “beyond reasonable doubt”, a defendant’s right to silence, and the burden of proof being on the prosecution?

Juries are frequently sanctified as trial by one’s peers. Cynics describe them as trial by amateurs.

Cases of juries using Ouija boards and waggling crystals in deluded efforts to reach a verdict are well reported.

Baylis, better than most, knows how flawed juries can be.

“Jurors aren’t blank slates. They come with their life experience, their prejudices, their reaction to what the defendant looks like, what the complainant looks like.

“I think there’s a degree to which having 12 people helps, sometimes. But I think it also depends hugely on the dynamics in the jury room. And that’s random luck.”

Baylis says it’s certain that jurors do conduct their own research during trials, discovering material deliberately suppressed, despite being instructed not to.

“And I think the idea juries aren’t going to look at any media coverage of a trial while it’s going on, is quite unrealistic.”

She also has sympathy for the way jurors are slingshotted between competing arguments from the prosecution and defence, each in turn sounding plausible and persuasive.

But that’s a function of our adversarial justice system, where the goal is to win, as much as it is to discover the truth.

In Dice, one character asks their colleagues how can they know which version of the truth to believe.

“That’s not our role,” replies another juror. “We’re not trying to find the truth.”

But Baylis says most jurors believe that’s exactly what their role is, when in reality, it’s to “look at the issues that are being tried, and to determine if it’s proven beyond a reasonable doubt.”

While she doesn’t doubt most juries try hard to do a good job, “the law is complicated and difficult”.

However, the problems go beyond jurors and their personalities and prejudices, and the power plays when they’re shut inside a small room to decide a defendant’s fate, Baylis says.

In some cases, she believes juries simply aren’t suitable.

“I think there’s probably still a place for the jury, but I don’t think the jury is right for sexual violence cases.”

She says jurors in such cases bring many myths and misconceptions about how sexual assaults occur and the role of the complainant, which some lawyers play to.

This leads to juries being less likely to convict in these cases, Baylis believes.

The alternative is to have cases decided by a judge alone (which occurs in some civil and occasionally criminal cases), or a judge sitting with a lay panel.

But judges are fallible too, have biases, and make mistakes, Baylis notes.

So, knowing all this, would Baylis prefer to be tried by a judge or a jury, if she was wrongly accused of a crime, like murder?

“I’d probably go for a judge.”

Baylis admits she found criminal law one of the hardest subjects at university. And sitting in the Nia Glassie trial, even with her years of legal experience, she sometimes struggled to align the complex

and complicated evidence, with the law.

In the end, despite her doubts, she felt the jury came up with good verdicts, and justice was probably done.

But in some trials she’s sat through, Baylis acknowledges she would have come to a different verdict from the jury. (She’s never been on a jury herself.)

Dice isn’t pushing any particular argument about juries, Baylis stresses.

“I genuinely want people to read it and think about the characters’ experience, and how the trial affects their lives, as well as how their lives and prejudices affect the trial.”

Catherine Chidgey says Dice “grabs you by the throat and doesn't let go. It's an intense, thought-provoking read, and feels very timely”. And she’s thrilled her former colleague has finally had her first novel published. “It's painful to see talent like that unrealised, but the wait has definitely been worth it.”

Baylis admits it feels pretty good to have a novel coming out in a few days, after almost 50 years of imagining it.

“I hope people like it and feel like it’s an important book.

“And I want it to be a story that’s gripping, and hard to put down, and that makes people think in all sorts of ways: about consent, about social media, about jury trials – and probably about society as well.”

“I think there’s a degree to which having 12 people helps, sometimes. But I think it also depends hugely on the dynamics in the jury room. And that’s random luck.” Claire Baylis