Legal Eaglets : Marshall High Mock Trial Team Finishes 2nd in National Contest

A team of 15 Marshall High School students placed second last week in the legal profession’s national mock trial competition in Louisville, Ky.

In competition Friday and Saturday, the Marshall team won four preliminary rounds against a field of 28 state champions. It was defeated in the championship round by a team from Wisconsin.

The 5-year-old mock trial competition is run informally by law groups and educators across the country. This year’s event was sponsored by the Court of Justice of Kentucky, the state’s Department of Education and the Kentucky Bar Assn.

In mock trial competition, students portray lawyers, witnesses and court personnel in imaginary trials following scripted evidence and legal citations supplied by the sponsors. In consecutive trials, each team presents and argues both sides of the case. Real judges preside, ruling on objections, then decide the winner. The decision is based on the style and effectiveness of the presentation rather than what the judges feel the actual verdict in the case might have been.

Repeat County Winner

The Marshall team, under coaches David Tokofsky and Claire Goldblume, has been the Los Angeles County champion two consecutive years.

Tokofsky switched to coaching mock trial competitions after leading Marshall’s academic decathlon team to the national title in 1987.

Last year, the Marshall mock trial team narrowly lost to a team from Orange County in the state championships, sponsored by the Constitutional Rights Foundation and the California State Bar.

After preparing most of the school year in rigorous after-school sessions, a new Marshall team returned to the state finals in Sacramento in April to try the case of a student arrested for selling cocaine. Marshall prevailed, qualifying to advance to the national event in Louisville.

The Los Angeles Unified School District agreed to finance the trips of eight students--the minimum required for a team--and three coaches to the finals. Team members raised about $5,000 from businesses and private foundations to send the other seven students and two adult advisers, including a Los Angeles Superior Court judge.

With only 3 1/2 weeks preparation, they were asked to try a civil lawsuit involving an imaginary school district that outlawed dancing under pressure from a coalition of churches in a small town. In the course of five trials, the Marshall students argued both that the rule was a violation of the Establishment Clause of the U.S. Constitution and that it was a reasonable outgrowth of a community’s values.

Team Sticks Together

Returning this week to a school in disorder because of the teachers’ strike, the mock trial team stuck together.

Tuesday afternoon, several members gathered at Tokofsky’s Los Feliz apartment to relax in front of the television and review the competition.

They said they took risks, seizing on errors by the Wisconsin team as they thought an actual lawyer would do in trial. The judges appeared to favor the more deliberate, planned attack of the Wisconsin team, whose members stuck doggedly to the script even after discrepancies arose through the vagaries of cross-examination, they said.

On the screen, a young attorney in a sports jacket and tie was vigorously questioning a witness. It was a video of one of their previous trials.

The students tuned in intermittently as they chatted. They occasionally burst into laughter and parodied the most minor defects in the mock lawyer’s performance.

It did not appear to be a group that was giving up on taking risks.