Justice: A Roll of the Dice with Claire Baylis

In Dice, four teenage boys are on trial on multiple sexual violence charges after inventing a sex game based on the roll of a dice. Can 12 jurors work out what actually happened? With their diverse backgrounds and beliefs, can they agree on complex issues such as consent and guilt? Baylis discusses these perplexing courtroom concerns and examines whether it is possible for a jury to deliver justice, in conversation with well-known defence lawyer Anne Stevens KC.

Claire Baylis was a law lecturer at Te Herenga Waka/Victoria University for 12 years before moving to Rotorua with her family. There, she worked as an interviewer and researcher for the Trans-Tasman Jury Study, and is one of the few people in New Zealand, Australia and the UK to have interviewed real jurors about real trials. Studying a PhD in creative writing at Victoria University gave her the opportunity to combine her work interviewing jurors with a novel about what can happen in a courtroom, and thus her first novel Dice was born. Claire’s fiction has appeared in Landfall, Sport, Takahē, Turbine/Kapohau, been anthologised in Horizons 4 and read on RNZ.

Anne Stevens, KC (BA, DipTchg, LLB) began practising law in 1988. In 1998 she went to the independent bar to focus on criminal and mental health law. Anne has taught both subjects at a university level and to allied professional groups. For 20 years, Anne has taught litigation skills to junior lawyers. She has appeared as counsel in jurisdictions from tribunals to appellate courts. Her principal work has been as defence counsel in over 170 jury trials.