Magistrate Competition 2015
On Saturday, 21stof March, thirteen Year 9 Manshead students took part in the Magistrate Competition run by the Citizenship Foundation in Stevenage. We competed against three other schools, Sir John Lawes in Harpenden, Nobel School in Stevenage and Presdales School in Ware. Across the two rounds our students stood in for the defence as well as prosecution team in an anonymised former court case with “real life” judges evaluating, which team would qualify for the finals.
We are very grateful for Mr Moffatt preparing our team so thoroughly and are extremely proud of our students, who did an amazing job and representing our school by presenting their cases so confident in such a formal setting in the following roles:
Magistrates: Wilf Sanderson (Chair), Francesca Morris & Kaylie Newman
Legal Adviser: Mia London
Prosecution Lawyers: Callum Duggan & Jude Mockridge
Prosecution Witnesses: Hannah Meadows & Pariss Peters
Defence Lawyer: Debbie Olesin & Michael Bordiak
Defendant: Kyle O’Connor
Defence Witness: Mathew Jenkins
Usher: Olivia Jeffs
“The day was very interesting as it was an eye opener and inspired us to take part in today’s society. Nerves were high but we battled through and enjoyed the competitive atmosphere. Our first competitors were strong but not as strong as our prosecution team and epically awesome legal advisor. They could not break our prosecution witnesses as they held strong in the dock.
The first team Presdales brought a good defence although they kept adding in information that had no relation to the case but they did have a great defence argument stating that there was no way that you could identify the defendant but the way our questions were asked. The performance we gave and the continuity we had gave us the upper hand and the magistrates said “guilty” proving that we did a good job. The amazing value of teamwork gave us unity in our performance and we pulled through. After the verdict we burst into celebration as job well done!
The second team were Noble. They had a good prosecuting argument but their questions had no relevance to the accused case, the theft of the mobile phone. So their questions were nowhere near the quality as ours. The mixture of Michael’s great enthusiasm and great points definitely tipped the scales. The closing speech as by far the best. Debbie delivered an amazing closing speech which clearly proved the inconsistencies in Noble’s prosecution team. However somehow the case was closed with the defendant being “guilty of the theft” which surprised us due to our amazing points and performance.
Overall Noble won the competition due to their performance against us but we cannot be sure how they performed against one of the other teams.
We were still happy with the results and all agreed that even though we were worried and nervous we would do it all over again.”
Pariss Peters
