Murder Trial, a prosecutor's perspective

Questions leading to answers

We role-played a murder trial to try to exercise getting out the answers we want or we need from the questions we ask
as what lawyers would do in a court.

Here's the perspective of the prosecutors:

The first question we asked, 'Do you admit to causing the death of John Lim, regardless of the intentions you may
or may not have?

The point of this question is for us to determine the stance or aim of the defendant, to find out whether
they are aiming for 'innocence'or 'involuntary manslaugther'.

Apparently, they headed for 'innoncence'.

The second series of questions, are a set of questions targeted at mom, dad and Mindy. These questions are
'What time did Mindy and John reach home?'
'Where were they before reaching home?'
'Why were they out?'

This sets of questions aims to find out any whether incoherence exist within the defendants' case and to obtain more clues in order to induce to cause of John's Lim death.A

As for the ambulance driver, it is the prosecuting team flaw not to "manipulate" this witness in order to win this case.
We just asked him about the emotional state of the people when he arrived on the scene.

An effective way to prove the case, which we forgot to do that day is to ask and find out what exactly happened
between 11pm and 1 am. And the obvious question to ask is 'why hadn't the parents try to stop the commotion?' This
shows a possibility that Mindy had killed John but the parents were making out this whole story that a quarrel or
commotion happened to defend their daughter.

One of the mistakes made on our side is not to directly find intent and reasons for the killing of John Lim, or
explictly state our thoughts from the ideas we get

In addition, we got into this silly discussion made up by the defendant that
i) Mindy is stupid > imply she can't kill.
ii) Mindy doesn't know how to use knife> imply she can't kill with a knife
ii) John learnt Bio and Physics > that's why he possiblity more dangerous than Mindu

Sidetracking a bit, if these premises and reasoning is true then
i) All killers are smart and intelligent, and people below a certain range of IQ can't possibly kill someone. Look's
like most of us here make good killers.
ii) Apparently, people need to go through 'How to kill with a knife for dummies' before being able to kill
iii) I'm probably able to kill by stabing a person's heart without breaking any of his bones, simply because I learnt
Physics and Bio

Hence, I guess we'll explore more of these things in 'critical thinking'.

Kudos to all who came up with ideas for this case.

Congrats to the defendants for winning. Before we close this case, I feel that the court should
i) Get Mindy back to school
ii) Hire better prosecutors next round