Junior Jane Kwak, president of Mock Trial, expected to walk away from Mock Trial’s first competition with a loss.
“We came in thinking we lost, because obviously the team that we went against was really experienced,” Kwak said. “We came in being like, oh, we will accept the loss because it’s just an experience.”
However, even with a first-year team, including eight freshmen and new adviser Melissa Chavez, they managed to pull off a win against the highly experienced Santa Margarita team.
“We were all jumping up and down and everyone was cheering and even Mrs. Chavez was really happy about it,” Kwak said. “It’s definitely a core memory that I definitely will hold on to, even if we don’t win the next two rounds that we have.”
FUHS Mock Trial won both the first and second round, making them one of only 16 teams out of the 48 who participated to win both of the rounds.
In Mock Trial, students roleplay various positions in court, like attorneys and witnesses, and take on a pretend case. The FUHS Mock Trial team participates in competitions set by The Constitutional Rights Foundation Orange County (CRF-OC).
Different schools face off against each other in the OC Supreme Court with volunteer judges watching their performance. There are multiple rounds, all surrounding one fictitious case. The teams switch being on the prosecution or defense side in the different rounds so the students are able to display their skills in both realms.
The rounds have taken place on Nov. 7 , Nov. 14 and Nov. 19.
Mock Trial requires students to not only make good arguments but also familiarize themselves with extensive material. They need to be skilled enough in public speaking to have a proper debate.
For example, Kwak played a pretrial attorney in the first round, meaning she, along with the other team’s attorneys and the judges, had to decide which evidence should be considered in the trial. Even though she was unable to get incriminating evidence against her defendant thrown out, she was still named MVP because she demonstrated strength in public speaking and familiarity with the case.
“The opposing team who gave me MVP said I was really passionate, that I had a great speaking voice and that I really knew the case well,” Kwak said.
Sophomore Olivia Woo, vice president of Mock Trial, earned the MVP award in the second round for similar reasons.
“They said that my argumentation and my presentation of the closing argument was really good,” Woo said. “Compared to last round I was a lot more memorized, so that allowed me to make eye contact with people.”
The case from CRW-OC this year is People v. Gold, where Logan Gold had allegedly abducted Taylor Alexander who was running against his spouse, Harper Dorais, for city council. Gold is accused of taking Alexander to a rental property and forcibly drugging them till unconscious to have them miss a crucial debate in the election. The students were given the witness testimonies, arguments from the prosecution and arguments from the defense.
The team had about a month to prepare to be both prosecution and defense. Witnesses annotated and memorized their testimonies while the attorneys came up with questions whose answers would support their arguments. The students had practices during lunch, after school and even spent Veterans’ day at Kwak’s house.
“It was like seven hours of just pure work,” Kwak said. “So obviously our team put so much effort into it.”
Kwak expressed pride in her team after they won their first round.
“The witnesses were really in character and they were really passionate about it and you could tell, even though we weren’t as experienced, that they were really into it,” Kwak said. “As a team, we were so collected and so unified and it was really nice to see that.”
Woo said their performance was even better in the second round.
“I honestly thought it was even better this round because we had experience under our belt so we knew what to do,” Woo said. “The teamwork was really, really great and the performances were really good as well.”
The Mock Trial members traveled to the courthouse on Nov. 19 where they fell short in competition against Foothill, a Top 8 school among 50 teams last year. Although the FUHS team will not advance to the quarter finals this season, they’re proud of how much they’ve improved in such a short time. The group is looking forward to the spring season when they will have a chance to try a new case.
