On February 5th, the Fieldston Mock Trial Team took part in their first competition of the year, and after over three hours of testimony and rigorous interrogations and cross examinations, they claimed their victory!
Fieldston’s Mock Trial Team, which has been active for over eight years now, is led by seniors Joey Ravikoff, Lucia Roure and Sam Weinick. The faculty advisors are Dr. Elizabeth Nolte, Upper School English Teacher, and Dr. Paul Heidmann, Upper School History Teacher, who were both Mock Trial kids in high school themselves. In fact, Dr. Heidmann won his state’s Mock Trial competition and went on to compete at the national level.
Mock Trial is an educational program that provides high school students with first-hand knowledge of civil and criminal law and courtroom procedures. Run by the New York State Bar Association, the competitions are held in actual courtrooms with a lawyer or judge present. Teams are given a case file, with affidavits and evidence, which they use to prepare for trial. Six members compete at once: three as lawyers and three as witnesses. Lawyers are responsible for questioning witnesses, and later providing the opening and closing statements, which bookend the trial. Witnesses are questioned once by their team’s lawyers in a direct examination and once by the opposing team’s lawyers in a cross-examination. Points are awarded for how good or bad a team is, and the team with the highest point total wins the competition. Each team must compete once as the prosecution and once as the defense. Ultimately the top team in every district participates in the finals in Albany.
“Mock Trial alternates each year between a criminal trial and a civil trial. This year’s case is a criminal case which is always more fun, and it’s also the best criminal trial I have seen during my time at the club,” saysWeinick (Form VI). “This year’s case is the People of Nirvana v. Lindsay Gordon, where Lindsay Gordon is accused of committing arson in the third degree on her own struggling business to receive the insurance money.”
In the February 5th competition the team competed as the defense with Roure (Form VI) playing the role of Lindsay Gordon, Zach Lodish (Form IV) playing her friend and financial advisor Ryan Casey and Cristina Ellis (Form IV) playing Leslie Neal, a loyal employee. The defense lawyers were played by Weinick, Ishaan Akileswar (Form V) and Julian Ghiazza (V).
The team attributes their victory to meticulous preparation which included multiple weekend Zoom sessions and countless hours of preparation analyzing the case. The team focused on even the most minute details, including carefully selecting outfits that reflected the personalities of the characters they were portraying.
Reflecting upon the competition, Weinick noted, “I have been doing Mock Trial for four years now and I think that this year’s team is the best that we have had. I am confident that we can go further than last year when we reached the top 16 — the best result in school history.”
Lodish added, “I thought that it was a great experience. It was my first time in a competition, and it was very interesting to see how the trial system works. I felt that our team did extremely well and every lawyer and witness on our team was very well prepared.”
What’s next for the team? They are preparing hard for the next trial on February 27th when they will compete as the prosecution. A win will propel them to the next phase of the competition: a tournament between the top teams in the district. The team is using what they learned from the first trial to their advantage, taking inspiration from both the other team and the judge. In the words of witness for the prosecution Alex Sursock (IV), “We want to win.”
(Follow the Mock Trial team’s Instagram, @fieldstonmocktrialclub, for more updates
