After months of competition, Andover’s Mock Trial Club was named the regional Champion of the 2015 Massachusetts Bar Association tournament at the end of Winter Term.
The tournament, held in the Lawrence District Courthouse, consisted of 140 teams from both public and private schools across Massachusetts competing against each other in an authentic courtroom setting with professional judges, said Kory Stuer ’15, Former Co-President of Andover Mock Trial. The new Co-Presidents are Claire Park ’16 and Lindsay Tausch ’16.
Stuer credited the club members’ thorough preparation for their win.
“I can say confidently that what made the difference was… putting in the sheer amount of time and getting the hang of the difficult mechanics of [Mock Trial] early on so that when we got to the higher levels of competition, we could really engage more meaningfully with the logic and performance of [Mock Trial],” said Stuer.
The club began preparing for the tournament in November. Preparation for the tournament was focused on memorization and professionalism.
“We had approximately two meetings each week. In one of those meetings, it might be a smaller, team-based meeting… that might take 45 minutes. And the other meeting would usually be on a Sunday morning, and we would meet and do a run through, a practice round, of a trial. It would be a way of making sure that we were prepared, that we could be thinking in trial mindset,” said Stuer.
Alison Nunes ’17 said, “We were just really prepared. We had really good leadership from our Senior Board. They made sure that we had everything memorized, that we knew all the rules, so that when it came to the trial, it was the little details that we really payed attention to as a group, and a lot of the other teams are missing that.”
Several tournament dates in January were postponed due to heavy snowfall, which lead to Andover attending three trials in one week during the tournament. The strange schedule was one of the biggest challenges for club members.
Each year, the tournament focuses on one specific case. Stuer said legal professionals from Massachusetts used real-life laws as a basis for writing the case, but used fictional characters and crimes.
Stuer said, “For this year, the case was a charge of murder against a 71-year-old grandparent accused of murdering an abusive son-in-law. The prosecution called it cold blooded murder, but the defense contended that it was self-defense.”
Nunes described the final trial against Chelmsford High School, her first time in the courtroom.
She said, “It felt like there were 50 people from the opposing team there, filling the balconies, and it really felt like a real trial, which was scary, but a lot of fun, too. I had to learn a new part, so in total, I learned three different parts as a witness. We only had six people who were able to make it, so we had to fill in. Everyone had to change up their roles a little bit.”
Antonia Leggett ’15, Former Co-Head of Mock Trial, participated in mock trial while in middle school and joined Andover’s Mock Trial club as a Junior, seeing the club as an opportunity for experience in both leadership and competition.
Leggett said, “For me, something that was especially rewarding was seeing the transition of soxme of the new members of the team, and seeing how far they were willing to come, and how much they helped the team in the end. I was very proud of all the work that I had done in organizing them, and the work that everyone on the team had done.”
Although Stuer inadvertently got involved with Mock Trial after being signed up for the club by a friend his Lower year, he now enjoys both the public speaking and legal aspects of the club itself.
Stuer said, “I really have had such a good time exploring not only the real life legal elements to it, because you are using real life cases and citing the Massachusetts general laws in the circumstance, but also being able to truly explore the performance aspect and the public speaking and your debate skills.”
Stuer also said that he particularly enjoys the fact that although Mock Trial features fictional cases, it feels realistic.
“One of the coolest things about Mock Trial is when you are performing in a real courtroom [and] in front of a real judge, you forget for a moment that you are a high schooler with a fictional case. For a moment, you are a real attorney, a real witness, using the real legal elements to prove a real case, and that is fantastic,” said Stuer.
