These are the established facts of a real manslaughter trial that occurred in Sydney some years ago: a male couple, living in an inner-suburban terrace, had an argument. The older man, an Italian, wound up dead at the bottom of their staircase. His partner, who hailed from China, was charged over his death.

Few other details can be revealed until the final instalment of SBS’s gripping true crime documentary series, The Jury: Death on the Staircase, goes to air.

Re-enacting this trial word-for-word – with only the names, dates and locations changed – the five-part program asks 12 volunteer jurors to assess the evidence. Their deliberations will result in either a hung jury or a verdict of guilty or not guilty. In the last episode, they’ll learn if their decision matches that of the original jury. Most of them weep when they discover the details of the case, which will be revealed to viewers at the same time.

“So much programming has sought to get behind the curtain, whether that’s in the maternity ward or people’s bedrooms, but no one has gotten into a jury room in this way,” says series director Tosca Looby. “Juries are such an important part of our justice system that I thought it was a fascinating opportunity.”

The program is adapted from an acclaimed UK format called The Jury: Murder Trial, which drew an impressive 6.3 million viewers. But there are two major differences: in Murder Trial, producers empanelled 24 jurors, splitting them into two “teams” to test whether their verdicts differed – and the case on which it was based has never been confirmed.

For Death on the Staircase, a single jury worked better.

“Our case is really based on circumstantial evidence,” Looby explains. “From a production point of view, we had to present the evidence in a way that didn’t confuse the jury or send them down rabbit holes.”

Almost every television production is a spectacle: lights, cameras and sound equipment; actors and crew members; wardrobe and make-up; catering and more. To avoid distracting their jury, production company Northern Pictures installed concealed cameras in the deliberation room and fixed cameras in the court.

Whenever the jurors filed into the Sydney courtroom where the program was filmed, the actors playing the judge, barristers, witnesses and defendant were already in character – and remained so until the jurors left.

“Even the phrase ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ was interpreted differently by all 12 of us.”

Juror Anya

“Never, for a moment, did the court fall into a television set,” Looby says. “Courts have a particular feel; they sound creaky with lots of silences and formality, and that exists to make people feel the profundity and weight of their task.

“When the jurors were in the deliberation room, you could see that they felt it was their space. There were some funny moments too, like when one of the jurors asked if we set someone up to be the foreperson and we were like, ‘Hang on, you guys all voted for him!’ Maybe that’s a symptom of reality television, where people are suspicious of what goes on, but so much of it fell in a perfect way that it almost seemed to the jury as if we’d fixed it.”

Curiosity about Australia’s criminal justice system prompted sex therapist Anya to sign up as a juror.

“When I was studying social science at uni, it planted a bit of a seed in terms of ‘some things aren’t quite right’, like the levels of incarceration of children or Aboriginal people,” she says. “But I’d been lucky enough not to have been involved in or exposed to criminal activities, so I hadn’t given much thought to whether the jury system delivers quality decisions.”

Naturally, most of us consider ourselves to be fair-minded and sensible; it’s others who are prone to pig-headed ignorance.

“Everybody came in thinking, ‘We’ll all just be reasonable and put our arguments forward,” Anya recalls. “I anticipated frustrations with other people but my understanding was that the law is meant to make things black and white. I couldn’t have been more wrong because everything is grey. Even the phrase ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ was interpreted differently by all 12 of us.”

This frustrated fellow juror Craig, an ex-prison officer.

“The judge told us we should base our verdict purely on the evidence,” he says. “Then some people would start going into all the what-ifs and maybes. They all thought they were in bloody CSI Miami.”

Dr Jacqui Horan, a jury researcher and Monash University associate professor who provided expert commentary for the program, notes that a jury’s task is complicated by a human desire for satisfying narratives.

“Some of them referred to [the case] like a jigsaw puzzle, and how frustrating it was to have pieces missing,” she says. “TV dramas often depict jurors as detectives of the truth and I think that’s where these 12 jurors struggled because they’re not detectives.”

Yet the varying experiences and views of jurors is one reason the system endures.

“We need to explore every option and what came through with this jury is how earnestly they took their role,” Horan says. “It’s a natural part of decision-making to hypothesise but it’s not necessarily wrong that it happens, as long as we’re reminded to get back to the facts.”

Indeed, most jurors openly acknowledged some of their biases. Anya, a gay immigrant like the defendant, was worried that homophobia or racism might taint others’ perceptions of him, while Craig admits his time as a prison officer left him jaded.

“For me, life experience for a juror is a big thing and if you’re living with your head buried in your bloody phone, watching social media, that’s not much of an experience,” he says. “And everything is money-related as far as the justice system is concerned, because there are not enough jails to hold all the criminals and not enough resources for police.”

For Horan, the impact of technology is significant.

“We have jurors who’ve gone through 13 years of schooling, where the use of technology to assist in their learning is instinctive,” she says.

“When they’re trying to define terminology, a search engine would be the first port of call and yet the courts are saying, ‘Don’t do that.’ In some cases, you can be jailed for doing that sort of research. One way of solving this is for the judge to say, ‘I am your Google; get the jurors to ask me questions’.”

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Horan says she found The Jury “completely captivating … it gives you a front-row seat to deliberations and an insight into how verdicts are made, which is a rare event.”

She is heartened by the participants’ willingness to recommend jury duty to others, and anticipates the series will motivate viewers to embrace their civic responsibility if they are selected for service.

Anya believes The Jury is an example of free-to-air television at its best.

“It’s about an important social and political issue and it’s genuinely engaging,” she says.

Craig hopes it will encourage audiences to be more open-minded.

“People are too quick to judge but things aren’t black and white,” he says. “We’re all different people with different views and we need to stop, listen and learn.”

WHAT The Jury: Death on the Staircase
WHEN 8.30pm Wednesdays on SBS from November 6

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