Yesterday evening was really exciting: they conducted a mock trial for us, where a defendant was accused of murder, a professor was sitting as a judge, a real district attorney (i.e. prosecutor) and a defense attorney acted for in the People of California v Walker case.
Twelve were selected as jurors in a procedure very much resembling the actual jury selection process, it was shorter, however. Even so, based on one question, a juror was de-selected and the regular clumzy guy, who just entered the room almost half an hour late as usual, was urged to the jury box, so that he would be replacing the juror they just lost to the audience. Luckily, this clumzy guy couldn't understand the question the district attorney asked him (which was: would he be comfortable convicting a defendant on the basis of one eye-witness testimony, if that seemed reliable enough) so he also got de-selected.
BTW, the hearing took place in the moot court room in the law school building, which was about to be taken apart and renovated, so we were the last people who saw it in its old form.
Anyway, two of our group volunteered for the roles of two witnesses and after some pretrial motions we finally began to see how these things are supposed to go around here.
The interesting part was that those of you who are maniacs of some American legal tv series would probably agree with me that this whole thing was exactly like on television. The tension, the way the attorneys were spinning the words and possibly the truth it was all realistic. Needless to say that they have been presenting this case to similar groups for over 15 years, but unexpected developments still came up. Suddenly, one of the witnesses, police office Eddie Murphy, made a reference to his partner, Mel Gibson (picture see below), who allegedly handed him a drivers license identifying the victim. Now Mel Gibson (see below) was actually sitting as a juror, but only the audience knew it. The professors and attorneys had no clue why suddenly everyone burst out in a huge laugh. Nevertheless the trial went on.
After hearing the witnesses, we arrived at the (in)famous closing arguments. Interestingly, the district attorney made a really big fuss about the speech, he argued using both of his hands, yelling, pacing up and down, it was almost like Alan Shore. :) On the other side, the defense attorney was very calm, organized and suggestive, it was obvious that he has been around for quite a while. But he was really spinning the facts, trying to confuse the jury about the testimonies they heard, giving them at least two red herrings to point them in the wrong direction. On redirect the district attorney finally exposed the "S.O.D.D.I:" strategy followed by defense counsel: "Some other dude did it." Now that's something they would not say in Maine or Massachusetts.
Then, we were informed that this mock trial will be a little different from the real ones: the jury has to deliberate in public. Probably the attorneys benefited the most out of this. In any event, it was fun to see that a trial here is not that different from what I expected.
Today was M&A day. Two attorneys from Squire Sanders & Dempsey gave us an overview of an M&A transaction. They were really good, except that the Japanese senior associate lady had a really weird pronunciation, it took me almost an hour to get somewhat used to it. Nevertheless, I finally got to see how a whole deal is structured. I only used to do specific parts of it back home.
Tomorrow will be Supreme Court day, that is to say teams of four (divided into sub-teams of two) must argue a case before the "Supreme Court" in a moot court setting. Probably I should start reading what the case is about. No rush. I will be the last to speak around 4.40pm. :)
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