By Angelina Perez, Arts and Entertainment Editor & Engagement Editor
After being present for a little over a year on campus, Manhattan College’s Mock Trial team has developed a fast-growing membership and received many opportunities, including competing at the national level. These competitions have brought MC head to head with some of the most prestigious universities in the country.
Junior accounting major Anthony Campolo is the current president of the team and guided The Quadrangle through the team’s success since becoming an organization on campus.
“Mock trial allows you to read a case, pick it apart on your account, and test your knowledge of it not just in a small classroom setting and practices but also during competitions where we get to test out those theories and strategies,” Campolo said. “[Mock trial] really thrives on the student body’s passion and dedication. This is an extracurricular activity. Students aren’t getting paid or a grade. They’re simply doing it out of motivation and joy.”
A few weeks ago, the MC’s Mock Trial team competed in their first national tournament at Princeton University in New Jersey. Campolo says the tournament was a step up from last year when they first started.
“Last year, we went to Connecticut, to a college I’ve never heard of, but now we’re going to Princeton,” Campolo said. “This year, we’ve also had scrimmages with Fordham, Iona and NYU.”
Campolo has been involved with mock trials since his sophomore year of high school. He says the comparisons between the high school and college levels range from what cases are covered to the specific details that go into pulling them apart.
“College is much harder,” Campolo said. “In high school, you’re pre-assigned a case with witnesses and charges that the prosecution is going to go after but in college, it’s all fair game. They give you a list of different charges and you could select from a pool of witnesses. You have to be prepared to cross-examine, as an attorney, any of those witnesses and prepare a bunch of stuff that you may not even use.”
Campolo took on many roles last year and hopes to encourage more engagement from MC students going forward.
“When we started last year, nobody on the team had done a mock trial before, not even in high school,” Campolo said. “I was the only person with the experience, so I took on the roles of marketer for the club to get people interested, treasurer to get the funds and more importantly, coach to coach everybody.”
Campolo was able to focus on his appointed attorney position this past semester because of the trust he has formed for his fellow teammates, especially those who are in their second term of the team, and their appointed coach Adriane Bilous, Ph.D., who is also the assistant director of the Center for Graduate School and Fellowship Advisement.
“At the mock trial, at the very least, you’re developing a good public speaking skill that is developed only here,” Campolo said. “You must formulate questions for witnesses on the spot, which helps develop a thinking-on-your-toes mentality and a self-advocacy and advocacy of others.”
Sophomores Nathalia Villafuerte, a political science major, and Gabrielle Blair, a double major in philosophy and political science, act on the club’s defense attorney team during trials.
“I’ve been an attorney for the past two years and what we do is write all of the examinations and get assigned opening or closing statements or another examination,” Villafuerte said. “We all just split up the work so that we each have at least one witness that we’re doing a direct examination with, and usually, it’s one or two people that we have to prepare cross-examination for.”
Villafuerte explained the process of examining the cases.
“We’ve been working on the case since winter break,” Villafuerte said. “And then early on in the semester, we did scrimmages with other schools which helped us look at objections to our questions and what we need to pay closer attention to.”
Blair talked to The Quadrangle about some of the common mistakes attorneys can make and how she manages to finish rounds strong.
“One of the biggest flaws with an attorney in which the judges will comment all the time is to not show your emotions and if you’re freaking out inside,” Blair said. “Learning how to showcase that you’re confident in your argument or idea when you might not be is really difficult to do, but also something that’s needed to be successful. I like to remember to take a deep breath and get everything under control. Also just looking the judge or the witness in the eyes shows that you have some sort of confidence.”
While the season might be over for the mock trial team, there are still many benefits to joining.
“If you’re interested in law school, at the very least, even if you’re just considering it, you can decide here if you like it to avoid the costly and timely mistake of applying and paying tuition to go,” Campolo said. ” If you’re an actor and you want to work on improv skills, you could be a witness and you could play a character that you’re given, and have to perform as that character. Additionally, even if you’re just somebody who wants to meet new people, work on their public speaking skills or work on their advocacy skills, this is the club for you.”