CHAPTER
1 | Creating Mock Trials |
Figure 1.1 Students at the Julius Streicher Mock Trial1
Creating a Mock Trial
Preparing a successful mock trial can be daunting. Over the past decade Iâve made mistakes that lower, a bit, the outcome for the students. Thankfully, I keep learning with each attempt and I think my current structure provides a deeper learning experience.
Here is a breakdown of the necessary steps for producing a new trial: choosing and teaching a story; selecting a defendant; choosing the witnesses; deciding where to hold the trial; organizing the logistics; putting together the assignment and scaffolding sheets; creating the affidavits and exhibits; determining the stipulated facts; and assigning the students.
Choosing and Teaching a Story
With myriad fascinating historical trials it might be difficult to choose one for the class if the goal is simply to do a mock trial. For me, however, mock trials came about when the actual historical trial was a key moment, or fulcrum, upon which a larger historical narrative turned. The trials in this book were each a central moment in a much larger chapter in human history, whether the Protestant Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, or the Holocaust. Given the demands of preparing and executing a mock trial, it makes more sense if the project fits into the larger content goals of your course. Only do a trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg if youâre spending time looking at American reactions to the Cold War.
For the trial to have meaning it needs to come after learning about the larger event and the larger context of history. Before our Nuremberg trial we spend weeks learning about the causes of the Holocaust, Nazi policies, and the concentration camps. We also study Martin Luther and Galileo before our cases not only because it provides meaning for them, but also because they cannot actually do the trial without that base comprehension. Since we are using primary sources set in those times and places, there is too much complex vocabulary, whether about âindulgencesâ or the âCopernican Systemâ that could trip students up, unless they already understand them. In short, choosing a trial case means fitting it within a larger historical unit for your course.
One common question about mock trials is whether to do a trial that actually happened or an imaginary one. I fall firmly in the former camp, although it is a bit more from a gut reaction than anything else. My sense is that since there is so much âhistoryâ out there for students to learn that did happen, it doesnât make much sense to spend time and effort engaging with something that didnât. By focusing on a trial that did happen we can then also have real discussions about its implications, consequences, and the perceptions around it. My goal is to make any role-play, even a trial, as authentic as possible and that can happen only through using actual witnesses and sources.
Selecting a Defendant
I made some errors in the past in choosing defendants and, thankfully, figured them out to the betterment of my subsequent trials. In some cases choosing the defendant is a self-evident step, such as in a trial of Martin Luther, Galileo, or To Kill a Mockingbird. When weâre looking at a genocide trial, however, the number of possible defendants expands considerably. Years ago I made the mistake of putting a Rwandan army general on trial, and with his evident guilt the trial ended up too one-sided. It was still exciting and the kids learned an incredible amount. But it wasnât the right defendant to use.
I now make sure to have a defendant who brings out moral complexities, who could be reasonably found either guilty or not-guilty, and whose case matter is accessible to students. I considered a few possibilities for a Nuremberg trial. First I looked for a possible doctor who we could put on trial, perhaps one who had done experiments on Jews and abused his authority as a physician. This time, I ran into a new dilemma, which was that I could not locate enough primary source material to put together a great trial with authentic evidence about the doctor. I knew, moreover, that if I put someone like Eichmann, Hess, or Goering on the stand the defense would have a nearly impossible case (interestingly, the same year there was a major mock trial of Herman Goering at the national Model UN conference, which I thought was a mistaken choice given his obvious culpability).
I began to consider three different witnesses at the same time, all of whom were defendants in the principle Nuremberg trial: Walter Funk, Albert Speer, and Julius Streicher. Funk and Speer were industrialists and economists, which raised an interesting moral dilemma about responsibility. Were those who financed the war, the army, and the camps responsible for the genocide? Julius Streicher, meanwhile, was a propagandist who used his newspaper, Der StĂźrmer, as a launching pad to incite hatred of Jews.
To choose between these three defendants I dove into the testimony of their cases to get a sense of what type of evidence would be available for the students to read. Using the Yale Avalon website, which has translation of the original court transcripts, I pored over the transcripts of the trials to begin to separate out the statements of possible witnesses. I gathered evidence for about 15 witnesses for Streicher and about 13 possible witnesses for the Funk case. When I began to look deeper into Speerâs case, I realized that the economic nature of his work was just not as comprehensible. I couldnât seem to glue together coherent statements that would make sense to my students. So, I threw him out of the running.
At that point I realized that I had a similar issue with Funkâs testimony. Yes, there was enough of it, but the content was so highly economic and technical that my students would have an extra layer of difficulty to wade through without a strong economic vocabulary. There are enough other tough things for them to do in this project. It probably wouldnât be as interesting for them. In the case of Julius Streicher, on the other hand, the evidence was available and the theme, propaganda, was both accessible and highly interesting to them. The testimonies were at a reachable level and his case raised thought-provoking issues about culpability. By the time the concentration camps were underway, the Nazi Party had mostly exiled Streicher and he was living on a farm. He took part in no major decisions involving the Ho...
