This school year, de Toledo has its first-ever Mock Trial team. At the end of the 2015-16 school year, teachers Mr. Chang and Mr. Masserman discussed the creation of a dT Mock Trial team.

“As an undergraduate, I competed for UCLA’s Mock Trial team, and we won a couple of national championships, so a Mock Trial program is something that I had really wanted to start. Mr. Wasserman was very interested in Mock Trial as well, and so we got together along with some students in the beginning of this school year to create our team,” said Mr. Chang.

Mock Trial is an extracurricular activity that takes place for students across the country and across the world. It encompasses all age groups at all different levels: middle school, high school, college, and law school.

In Mock Trial, students pretend to be a witness or an attorney in a court of law, trying a case.

This year’s case was written by the Constitutional Rights Foundation, which is an organization that runs Mock Trial competitions throughout the state of California. The case which students will be discussing considers human trafficking and false imprisonment. In this specific case, a man is accused of taking one of his employees, violating his or her freedom, and forcing this person to labor sexually for his profit.

Mock Trial is not only an interesting and educational extracurricular activity, but it gives student the opportunity to learn about legal principles, objections, rules of evidence, how to direct a witness, how to cross-examine, and how to think strategically. They then have the opportunity to compete against other teams while being observed by experienced state and federal judges and lawyers.

“It trains students to be professional, to speak in public, to be polished, and how to win,” said Mr. Chang.  

This past Tuesday, November 1st, de Toledo competed in its first ever Mock Trial competition at Stanley Mosk, a courthouse in downtown Los Angeles. Over one hundred teams from all across LA competed against one another.

Each team was given a position, either prosecution or defense, where they acted out the case while being judged on their performance by a judge or lawyer.

This competition was the first, and hopefully far from last, that dTHS has competed in, and they will continue to do so until being disqualified.

Mr. Chang said that the results of this competition will be announced next week, and “we are hopeful that we will be able to qualify for the state championship which will take place in Riverside, California next year.”