Thoughts on Napoleon Trial

Here are my thoughts on last weeks trial.

The biggest problem was the fact that people simply did not know their witnesses well enough. But how can we blame them, when they were only given a two weeks to prepare?

Earlier this year I joined Mock Trial. Mock Trial was, in many respects, very similar to the 'mock trial' that we had in class last week. Still, I think a lot can be learned from the actual Mock Trial program, considering that the organization that designed this program has worked out a really good way to run it effectively. For one thing, they have put a lot more thought and effort into it (over the course of many years) than Ms. Xia could ever have done in just a few weeks. I'm not saying this to take a stab at Ms. Xia and her teaching methods; Rather, I'm merely pointing out that we can learn a lot from an organization that has been doing this kind of activity for much longer than we have.

In Mock Trial, each team is given a set of witness statements. They assign one person to each witness, and that person has to basically memorize their statement in order to fully understand who they are, how they want to portray themselves, and how they were involved to the case.

The prosecution and the defense attorneys can essentially do two things when examining the witnesses:
They can ask the witness about facts that were on the witness statement
OR
They can ask the witness to draw reasonable inferences based on the evidence.
BUT
They cannot ask the witness to make up things that were not on the witness statements. Also, the witnesses cannot (for the most part) give their opinion unless they are an expert witness, or they are drawing a reasonable inference from the facts.

Because of the fact that in our 'mock trial', the examiners were allowed to ask about ANYTHING that the real historical figure would know, we basically ended up with witnesses that were unable to answer the questions asked of them (simply due to a lack of historical knowledge). This is completely understandable; I would never expect a witness to spend hours and hours every night, memorizing every single fact and details about their lives. It's simply not a realistic, fair, or even necessary goal to set for these kinds of mock trials.

I think it would have worked better if the witness had to write statements, and the statements would be given to both the prosecution and the defense. Each side could then inform the witness of key things/important facts that they might have left out, and perhaps Ms. Xia could approve a final copy of these statements. This would require much less excessive historical research on the part of the witnesses. It would also give us more time to prepare for other aspects of the trial.

Lastly,
I've only been in Mock Trial for a few weeks now, so I may have totally misrepresented a lot of facts about the program. If I did, (Marjory) feel free to leave a comment below, and I'll edit my post accordingly.