This year, a new activity has been added to the growing list of clubs at LHS: Mock Trial. Although Mock Trial in Colorado high schools has been around since 1985, this is the first year students have ever gotten a chance to be apart of a realistic court scenario at LHS.
“Mock Trial is a National Organization and then within that, each state kind of creates their own system and the state organization. They come up with a case, whether it be a civil case or a criminal case, usually it rotates every other year, they kind of make a composite of different cases that maybe they’ve had and then they put fictitious names to the plaintiffs and the defendants,” said adviser Lisa Sutterer.
This year, the students in Mock Trial have a case titled “In Re the Estate of Gayle Gergich” where a pair of siblings have a dispute over their mother’s will. The students can either take the role of a witness or a lawyer.
“They have to learn both sides of the case because when they go to competition they don’t know if they’re going to be the defense against another team’s prosecution or vice versa, so they really get to know the case thoroughly because if there are witness on defense than they also have to play the role of the witness on the other side too,” said Sutterer.
There are three tournaments that students can get the chance to compete in, a smaller, regional one that takes place in February, a state competition in March and a national competition in May.
The competitions are judged on how well and accurately the witnesses can portray the character they’re given and how the lawyers object or use the legal “vocabulary” realistically.
“I think [students can] get a lot of experience with being in a courtroom and knowing how court works and how people work and how judges work and lots of words that you need to know for objections. So just kind of overall court processes that you wouldn’t know, maybe from like watching TV shows you would know but it’d be cool like if you want to be a lawyer it’s cool to see it all go down and actively practice the law and dealing with it,” said sophomore Whitney Winslow.
In the first year, Mock Trial has already gotten enough people to form 3 full teams to compete and even has an intramural eighth grade team to get a feel of how it would work when they can compete as freshmen.
“I think that over time, over the years, people will want to do it more and more students will want to join. Also Thespians and also people who want to be lawyers, Thespians can have the role of witnesses so it’s really cool because lots of kids don’t necessarily know if you really want to act and stuff so it’s also really cool for those people because you get to play this role of a witness,” said Winslow.
