What I Personally Do

These past few posts have been quick summaries of what my teams have accomplished at tournaments. This time, I want to show you what I specifically do when I compete.

I have played many witnesses over this season, but I played Maddox Vaughn the most often.

If you remember from my earlier posts, Maddox Vaughn is a good friend of the defendant and claims to have seen the defendant on the other side of town when the fire started.

Maddox provides an alibi to the defendant, which makes the prosecution a little unhappy. As such, they like to remind the court that Maddox was around 7 drinks in the night of the fire and has a lot of bias toward the defendant.

Essentially, the prosecution wants to make Maddox seem like a lying drunkard. The worst part is, with how the affidavit is written, they are not inherently wrong.

An affidavit is usually between 8 and 12 pages long. Maddox wrote 3 pages and contradicts themselves in it.

In one line, Maddox says (in reference to the night of the fire) “I don’t remember much from the night before.” Then Maddox immediately backtracks and says “So, I figured, I was basically sober. I can remember everything that happened on July 31st and August 1st, 2020.”

If someone would like to explain how you can simultaneously not remember much and also remember everything, I’d love to know. None of us figured out what Maddox meant by that, so I just had to roll with it.

Remember this contradiction, it’ll come up later.

We brought a camera to one of our competitions, which means I have footage of my direct and cross examinations. If you want to watch all of it, be my guest. But don’t worry, I understand that not everyone wants to watch ten minutes of a girl from Yale questioning me as I pretend to be an alcoholic. I’ll give approximate time stamps of when interesting things happen.

Direct Examination:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1CsA6jTXppwVLe9XowSFrD8h9ze-9ekUU/view?usp=sharing

This was a pretty standard direct examination, nothing too insane happened during this. The man questioning me is Mohammed, he’s one of my teammates and he was my attorney for this competition.

At about 1:20, we finish up my personal introduction and start talking about Dakota. This is where we try to show that Dakota really cared for the bar. We are trying to imply that Dakota loves the bar too much to have burned it down.

At 2:23 we start talking about what Maddox was doing on the night of the fire. This is to establish where I was before we introduce the alibi. I cannot directly state that Dakota wouldn’t have enough time to drive back to the bar, so I have to say that if I were driving, I wouldn’t be able to make it in that amount of time.

Direct examinations are supposed to be quick and easy, so not much happened here.

Cross Examination:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/18lDdEe9PLrzw7781v83V_M0XBywVVJi1/view?usp=sharing

0:56 The crossing attorney starts listing the drinks I had that night 1 by 1.

1:15 Remember that contradiction I mentioned earlier? Here it is. When she first brings it up, I try to give a middle of the road answer that shows that I don’t remember much and also remember everything. This was in a hope that she wouldn’t fight it.

That was wishful thinking. She started pressing me, but I knew I could fight it if she brought my affidavit out. I looked at Mohammed and saw him nod. I went for it.

When the attorney brings my affidavit up to me, she is trying to “impeach” me as a witness. She’s calling me a liar, but professionally. Unfortunately for her, I know my affidavit well and cited the exact line that contradicts it.

I have never felt so smug in my life. My scores were significantly higher than hers because of that.