A criminal justice major, my friend asked me to sit as a jury member on her class' mock trial tonight. The prosecutors wanted to prove that Phoebe was intentionally murdered by her jealous roommate Vicky; the defense wanted to prove that Phoebe was in fact suicidal, and her death had been by her own hands--not Vicky's. During this trial, the jury was allowed to read Phoebe's diary entry, dated the night before she was found dead in her dorm room. The diary entry was short, but it quickly dismissed the idea that Phoebe was suicidal. However, because the prosecutors were looking to convict Vicky of first degree murder, and the jury deemed all of the other evidence at the trial inconclusive, Vicky was found not guilty.
One of the witnesses read the journal entry aloud before one of the prosecuting attorneys passed it to the jury. When I received the entry, I was suddenly struck with how impacting inflection would've been when reading aloud. The entry was punctuated with several exclamation points and a smiley face (determining importance). Clearly this couldn't have been from a depressed girl's journal (inference). Even when another attorney read the entry again in his closing statement, his voice still didn't reflect the excitement I read in her written tone.
Regardless, we the jury found Vicky not guilty. While evidence was inconclusive for first degree murder, evidence for suicide was also inconclusive. Although Phoebe's counselor mentioned Phoebe's occasional pessimistic, down-on-her-luck moments, this entry obviously showed that she didn't intentionally kill herself that same evening (inference). On the other hand, I wondered if Phoebe wasn't just hiding her feelings, or if she had written the wrong date for the entry and something upsetting had occurred soon after to push her over the edge. I think I wondered this because of my own experiences with suicide (making connections). I've had a couple of friends confide in me their desires to kill themselves; I had even considered it myself during my high school years. While Phoebe didn't show signs of depression, that didn't mean she wasn't considering it. On the plus side, like my other friends (still alive, I'm thankful to say), she reached out to a counselor for help for the other aspects of her life.
Unfortunately, when the jury made its decision, the professor for the class announced that Vicky had indeed killed Phoebe. On the plus side, this is only a mock trial, so no one's dead or being convicted/released; and even if it were true, I could only hope that being deemed not guilty of first degree murder would've changed Vicky's ways.
Journal Entry. Mock trial for Criminal Justice class of Evangel University. Professor Myers.
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