Students Practicing Law in Bid for Mock Court Championship

Katherine Lincoln and Victoria Mah are obsessed with the case of 17-year-old Cindy Ballard, who is accused of running down a jogger in a hit-and-run accident in April.

Both have spent hundreds of hours preparing a legal case. They have examined and cross-examined the girl at eight trials, and will call her to the stand at least three more times this week in Sacramento Superior Court.

More than justice will be at stake. Katherine and Victoria, along with five other Chatsworth High School students, want to be part of the third Valley high school team in four years to capture the state mock trial championship.

The fictitious Ballard has been found both guilty and innocent in hundreds of mock trials conducted during preliminary county contests, which started in October. More than 4,000 students throughout California have presented People vs. Ballard before municipal and superior court judges and attorneys who volunteer their services to help teach youngsters about the criminal justice system.

Chatsworth High School’s seven-member mock trial team held its own against 68 other Los Angeles County high school teams, most working with twice as many members, to earn a berth in the two-day state finals starting Tuesday. Twenty-one teams will be involved in the competition.

Honing Skills

Students say the abbreviated, hypothetical trials are a riveting way to learn about the criminal justice system and to hone research, speech, acting and writing skills.

“A lot of teachers will lecture and expect you to take notes and give you a test where all you do is try to remember what they’ve said and then forget it all. It doesn’t really teach you anything,” said Katherine, 16, who has become so enamored of mock trials that she has joined a second team to compete informally with neighboring schools and is considering going on to law school.

“Mock trials give us a chance to participate in an important legal process from the inside. It’s exciting.”

According to Daphne Dennis, who organizes the tournaments for the Constitutional Rights Foundation, students acting as prosecuting and defense attorneys, witnesses, court clerks and bailiffs try the case within strict time limits and are given points for their performance by volunteer lawyers, who act as a jury.

Although the judge who volunteers to oversee the trial hands down a verdict in each case, winners are decided by cumulative scores.

Contests Mushroomed in Size

In California, the competitions have mushroomed in size since half a dozen Los Angeles schools first competed in a 1977 county tournament. The first state tournament in 1982 attracted nine teams.

This year, 286 teams in 22 counties competed for a position at the state finals.

Organizers say competition has stiffened as the program has grown, but Valley high schools have represented Los Angeles County at all three state tournaments and have made it into the final round each year.

Dennis said Our Lady of Corvallis High School, an all-girl private school in Studio City, won the 1984 title. North Hollywood High School won the 1982 state title and finished second in 1983.

Because of the Valley’s reputation for winning, Chatsworth High School students say they’ve been under scrutiny by students and coaches from several other county teams, who have come to watch them perform.

“It’s like in football. They’re sending around the scouts to see what we’ve got on them,” said team coach Shirley Hess, a social studies instructor at the high school.

Key to Success

Their winning advantage, the Chatsworth students say, is often mistaken by other teams to be a handicap.

“Most groups work with 12 or 14 people. We’ve only got seven, so we’ve been forced to take two roles each and learn both the prosecution and the defense really well,” said Jane Rudofsky, 18, whose father, trial lawyer Jack Rudofsky, coaches the team on procedural tactics.

“We know how to think about it from both sides, no matter which side we’re competing on,” said Victoria, 17.

According to competition officials, Victoria knows what she’s doing. She was one of only four student attorneys countywide to receive a Judge’s Achievement Award and was the only lawyer commended by every judge she appeared before.

Argues With Judges

“I’ve learned not to be afraid to argue with the judges. Even judges make mistakes and if you think they’re making a mistake, you should pursue that,” Victoria said, admitting that she was much less aggressive before she joined the team.

Her sister, 15-year-old Annie, who performs as a witness during the trials, likes to describe how Victoria continued arguing with a judge after he had overruled her objection during a mock trial last fall.

Victoria’s tenacity paid off: The judge reversed his decision on the objection and later praised the girl’s reasoning.

“I like it because this is really much more mentally stimulating than physical athletics,” said Annie Mah, who swims on the school’s junior varsity team.

The Chatsworth students, unlike most teams, do not have regular class time to practice their techniques. Instead, they meet with Rudofsky and Hess at night, on weekends and before school in members’ homes.

Learn Complex Tactics

The students credit their coaches with teaching them courtroom tactics other teams do not seem to understand.

At a practice session last week, the teen-agers ran through their routine, frequently interrupting one another to polish defense and prosecution theory, quoting penal code to prove a point and suggesting when objections would be appropriate to throw the opposing lawyer off track.

“If you hit them with a good objection, the other lawyers often just skip the whole subject,” Rudofsky reminded the team. “And you’ve got to remember to make their objections look pointless. Get them overruled and that confuses them, too.”

Witness Jim Achuff, 17, said the team always meets to improve its tactics after each stage of competition “because every trial brings up something new that you can use later, if you remember to.”

Hess said it is up to the students to learn from each round of competition. She has never attended one of their trials and, although she will travel to Sacramento with them, she does not want to be in the courtroom for the state championships.

Finds Trials Too Exciting

“My blood pressure went up 10 points after the first competition with my first team,” she said. “I just get too involved in the excitement. So I don’t watch them. I can’t watch them.”

Hess said she has been teaching law-related classes for more than 17 years because she enjoys “watching students learn by doing it all themselves.”

To get students interested in mock trials, Hess writes her own trial plots for her beginning law classes; the plots are less dry than those written by lawyers and used in tournaments.

She said a video version of one of the trials she wrote, People vs. Goldilocks, was nominated for an Emmy.

“School can be so boring. It’s like a mausoleum,” she said. “This breathes some life into it. This shows them the importance of what they’re learning.”