Courtroom Cubs Are Legal Eagles

Their parents aren’t lawyers. Eight months ago, they couldn’t have told you the difference between a pretrial motion and a deposition if their lives depended on it. For many, their sole exposure to the legal system was watching “L.A. Law” and fending off traffic tickets.

But that didn’t stop a group of students from Dorsey High School near Baldwin Hills from acing out 42 other high school teams to win the Los Angeles County Mock Trial Championships recently.

Displaying pluck, tenacity and a preparedness that would give Clarence Darrow pause, the Dorsey students--who have evolved from an admittedly undisciplined, ragtag band to a lean, mean litigating machine--trounced teams from La Canada Flintridge, Woodland Hills, Pacific Palisades and other areas heavily endowed with sons and daughters of high-powered lawyer types.

“They were very impressive,” conceded Michael Teleska, coach of the mock trial team fielded by Louisville High School, a private, all-girl academy in Woodland Hills that came in second in the Los Angeles County competition.

“The difference between Dorsey and us was that they were very natural in the courtroom, very relaxed. We looked like high school students trying to be very good lawyers. They looked like lawyers.”

Now, fresh from their county victory, the Dorsey team members are honing their courtroom delivery and girding for the state championships, which will be held April 2-5 in Sacramento. Both events are sponsored by the Los Angeles-based Constitutional Rights Foundation and pit teams of high school students against each other to argue the defense and prosecution of a drunk-driving case. The state winner goes on to a national competition in May.

“Last fall, we literally were scraping the hallway for kids,” said Dorsey history teacher James Berger, who recruited his eight mock trial members--most of them sophomores and juniors--with a mixture of badgering and encouragement. “Now they’ve developed self-confidence. They’ve come out of their shells. It shows that if you set out to do something and commit yourself, you can succeed.”

Berger says he spent a lot of time stressing the importance of teamwork and pumping up his students’ morale.

“I never tried to instill in them the idea that they were at any kind of disadvantage,” he said. “I wanted them hungry to win but I didn’t want them to consider that they were starting off with anything less than anyone else. They came through because they have the talent.”

Local merchants--especially from the nearby Crenshaw Shopping Center--have chipped in to help pay trip expenses to Sacramento, Berger said. Students may hold bake sales to raise the balance.

For their part, team members credit their success to Berger, English teacher and team co-sponsor Marcia Kpado, and Marcia Brewer, a Baldwin Hills attorney who volunteered her time as a coach. Each morning at 7, Berger and Brewer would straggle into the classroom and spend an hour before school drilling the team on the fine points of cross-examination, discovery and hearsay.

On a recent day, Brewer drilled her team on a point of law until they got it right, honing the language and logic until it flowed seamlessly. The student witnesses quickly learned to offer only the barest of facts when answering the questions put to them. Student attorneys learned to probe for weakness, attack when they found holes in logic and object to questions they deemed irrelevant.

All those early morning hours apparently paid off, said Sharon Matsumoto, a deputy district attorney for Los Angeles County who was one of three judges of the Mock Trial Championships.

“A lot of times in the competition, students have probably never seen a trial and have no idea about how they’re supposed to behave in court and as a result, they appear very stiff,” Matsumoto said.

However, with the Dorsey team, “in terms of their presence, their style, their ability to articulate a position, frame an objection and respond to an objection, you would have never known they hadn’t been to law school and spent years in a courtroom,” Matsumoto said.

One recent winter morning, while other high school students were still asleep, the Dorsey mock trial team pressed forward.

“Help him out, give him another question,” Brewer urged her 16-year-old defense attorney when the 15-year-old witness stumbled in recounting what he was doing in the early hours of Saturday morning, when his car was involved in a hit-and-run accident that put a pedestrian in the hospital.

Jermon Maxey, an eloquent 16-year-old Dorsey junior who won a special Mock Trial award as outstanding student litigator, said his experience in the competition has set him squarely on the path to a law career.

“I love to argue, I’ll argue with anyone about anything, but my family won’t argue back, they just go in their room and shut the door,” Maxey said, explaining why he is drawn to the fencing and jousting of the courtroom. “This has settled my mind; I’ll be a pre-law student in college, certainly.”

Maxey also has discovered that he can apply his new-found talents to the outside world.

“I recently got a traffic ticket and I’m going to take it to court and fight it because of what I’ve learned in this class,” he said.