what a rush (part one)

Yesterday in criminal law, I argued my first case before a jury. The jury was entirely composed of my classmates, and the judge was my professor, but it felt very, very real to me.

I found myself in this situation voluntarily when my professor asked for four students for an exercise a few days ago. My friend C., who sits next to me, volunteered. I didn’t, but when the professor asked me I didn’t mind.

The professor handed us a fact sheet describing the circumstances leading up to a homicide. We were split into prosecutor/defense pairs. One pair would argue under common law and the other under the Model Penal Code. The professor picked randomly and I was assigned Model Penal Code, prosecution. Our instructions were to prepare closing arguments to the case and present them to the class. The prosecutors were to argue for the harshest murder charge possible for their system, and the defense attorneys were to argue for either a not guilty verdict or the most lenient homicide charge possible.

I took the assignment, went back to my apartment, and panicked.

I’m not excessively shy, but the idea of trying to appeal to a group of my peers was terrifying. I had always figured I’d be a writer-lawyer, not a speaker-lawyer, that I’d slip comfortably into the silent ranks of the lawyers who draft contracts, wills, trusts, patent applications, and all of the other written documents that churn our society forward. Arguing in front of a jury was something those other lawyers did, those lawyers who were picked first for the team in junior high or the former class clowns. Juries, I always thought, wanted to see the kid who was voted most popular, not the kid with the dubious title of “Most Likely to Know Something Weird.”

My husband, as always the voice of reason, told me to practice. After all, he pointed out, public speaking is a skill, and few are born with it. So, grabbing hold of his advice, I threw myself into the assignment. For the first time in law school I fell behind in my reading in my other classes. I wrote out my speech several times and grappled with the language of the MPC. My husband argued it out with me, and by the time I was done, I was convinced the guy was completely guilty of murder. I wanted to throw the book at him, but whether I could persuade a class of young, liberal students in a liberal school in a liberal state was another thing. At least I knew the law thoroughly.

(I'll finish the rest tomorrow.)