May it please the court, our fifth day began with the introduction of another mini mock trial. This case involved the hitting of a cyclist on a crosswalk by a driver. How far our lawyers have come! Each side wove together clear narratives based on witness testimony. They found flaws in the assumptions of the other counsel and holes in the testimony of most witnesses. The day ended with practice for tomorrow’s trial of Sacco and Vanzetti. Our lawyers have been constructing clear strategies for cross examination. It is anyone’s guess what the jury will decide when presented with the evidence. Will the judge allow prejudicial testimony about the defendants’ anarchist affiliations? It is going to be an interesting day at the courthouse.
Lawyer Spotlight: Sonia Sotomayor
“Experience has taught me that you cannot value dreams according to the odds of their coming true. Their real value is in stirring within us the will to aspire.”
“I do know one thing about me: I don’t measure myself by others’ expectations or let others define my worth.”
“Until we get equality in education, we won’t have an equal society.”
“My job as a prosecutor is to do justice. And justice is served when a guilty man is convicted and an innocent man is not.”
Image of Sonia Sotomayor is in the public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
From Wikipedia: “Sonia Maria Sotomayor is an American lawyer and jurist who serves as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. She was nominated by President Barack Obama on May 26, 2009, and has served since August 8, 2009. She is the third woman, first woman of color, the first Hispanic, and first Latina to serve on the Supreme Court…
Sotomayor graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University in 1976 and received her Juris Doctor from Yale Law School in 1979, where she was an editor at the Yale Law Journal. She worked as an assistant district attorney in New York for four and a half years before entering private practice in 1984…
While on the Supreme Court, Sotomayor has supported the informal liberal bloc of justices when they divide along the commonly perceived ideological lines. During her Supreme Court tenure, Sotomayor has been identified with concern for the rights of defendants and criminal justice reform, and is known for her impassioned dissents on issues of race, ethnic, and gender identity, including Schuette v. BAMN (2014), Utah v. Strieff (2016), and Trump v. Hawaii (2018).”