In the 2018-19 school year, the MVHS Mock Trial team went from familiarizing themselves with the new members and building their new family to finalizing the 2019-2020 officers. Throughout the year, the Mock Trial team has faced difficulties with choosing new officers and establishing bonds through preparing for competitions. As the school year comes to an end, the new Mock Trial officers reflect on their growth and challenges throughout the year.

El Estoque: What new position do you assume and what does your role encompass?

Junior Sanika Gupta: I am the Officer of Public Relations (PR) for Mock Trial next year. As a PR, I am tasked with sending out emails. I have a co-PR too and so we decided that she is going to be doing most of the emailing and I will be doing the marketing and the promotional stuff. So profile pictures and events and we’re also doing Kennedy reach out. Kennedy has a Mock Trial club and we want to get them involved.

Junior Sonali Merchia: I was a co-president this year, so basically I have job security. And I’m going to be a co-president next year.

Freshman Vaishnavi Suresh: My position is Operations and that’s basically organization.

EE: What have you learned so far this year and what do you hope to learn next year?

Gupta: I have learned how to write effective directs. Those are questions you ask as an attorney to your witness. I’ve also learned how to write brilliant crosses. That’s when you ask questions to an opposing counsel witness to try to get them to make a fault so you can either

impeach them for being a horrible witness and you can remove all their testimony from the record, or you can get them to be falsified. So the judge has to agree that they weren’t an accurate representation.

Merchia: Mock Trial is a competitive club, so essentially, we do want to carry on the quality of work and scheduling that we did this year. But we’re also hoping to hoping to ramp up recruitment and we want to do a few more general law education sessions, which are sort of fun activities.

EE: What were some most memorable anecdotes?

Gupta: For probably the most memorable thing was this one meeting we had in December, where Justin Zheng, who’s my attorney because I was a witness since I’m a first year member, and I went outside to practice our direct. We both memorized the direct and we were ready for it. We were just spending some time having fun outside. And I remember we spent the entire time just laughing about how we cannot look at each other without laughing. And this was something we needed to practice. Because in court, if my attorney’s asking me a serious question, because I was an expert, so [I had]  to be really serious. So we practice just staring at each other not smiling or laughing or anything, which was actually pretty fun.

Merchia: I’ve developed some really strong, lifelong friendships and I’ve just had a lot of fun with the club overall. I feel [like] there’s sort of one big, strangely sometimes dysfunctional family.

Suresh: I really enjoy, especially throughout the year, the meetings and in the meetings we created a lot of memories of jokes when discussing cases and case studies.