Tuesday, October 27, 2009

Robespierre Trial

Although the whole trail was very confusing, I agree with the decision of the jury and the prosecution of Robespierre. He ruthlessly and pointlessly killed too many people to be considered an innocent man.

For me, it was hard to figure out exactly what each side was arguing in the trail. Most of the witnesses mumbled, a majority of the examiners' questions were objected to, and the whole thing just seem a little disorganized with people yelling across the room the whole time. The only major and confirmable point that I found relevant was that Robespierre was responsible for numerous deaths that were uncalled for every single day. I think the actual statistic was an average of 28-30 deaths every day.

This trial just seemed less controlled and less on task than the Napoleon trial. Part of it might have been that it was the end of the day, but the countless interruptions, both through objections and by random comments from the jury, slowed down the trial and made it very difficult for any valid arguments to come up. There was too much arguing over tiny rules and not enough legitimate interrogation of the witnesses. Also, when objected to, the examiners seemed unwilling to change their question for the witness and this didn't help move anything along either.

I think the idea of having trials for Napoleon and Robespierre was an effective way to learn a lot of the material, but i think everyone would have learned more if it had been more controlled/organized and if we had gone over more of the rules within a "courtroom" beforehand. It doesn't matter if we go over the rules in class or in our trial teams, but i think that people were not familiar enough with the rules, especially for objections, to effectively run a trial.

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