Guys! I was a rockstar in my advanced trial advocacy class today. I was the last student up, representing a man who’d been accused of murder. I was full of pauses, full of meaningful glances at the judges, full of elbow-patched sportsjacket gravitas. I was pretty sure I was going to get shot down for being too Hollywood, but I was determined to get as much fun out of it as I could before that happened.

And then my submissions were over, and the first word I hear is, “Excellent!” Another judge asks if I’d ever done this before.
“Closing statements?” I ask, confused because we practise something new every week. “No.”
“No, trials,” he says, smiling.
“… No.”
“Well, everyone was great tonight,” he says, “but you took it up a notch.”

Guys. That notch had nothing on 5’3″ me.

Here’s the thing, though. Several weeks ago I had to do mock opening statements for this course, and I was definitely not a rockstar that night. Progress!

Another thing is that there are concrete reasons I felt comfortable with delivering today’s content. Much of it revolved around the presumption of innocence. I’d already spent this morning talking about precisely that bit of law with grade 12 students in a workshop on criminal law. They were an incredible collection of youth — so engaged and well-informed (we law students had to field questions about the Keystone Pipeline protests, the criminality of police negligence re missing & murdered aboriginal women, and where bail money goes, among other things. Phew.) — so I walked away from that morning meeting riding a high that carried over into the evening class.

As well, the work I’m doing in the Innocence Project has driven home for me the crucial importance of protecting the rights of accused persons. We just cannot afford to keep messing it up. There are too many innocent people languishing in jails. The knowledge that I’m accountable to one such person made the material urgent, made it live. When I talked about the fact that sending innocent people to jail does not further the pursuit of justice, even though that means acknowledging that we do not know who the real murderer is, I had perforce to speak slowly, because this is the core issue I’m struggling with in my casework. It’s a frightening thought; it demands sobriety.

So, I’m really excited for that to be part of my professional life — this urgency, this stress/anxiety/guilt/fear, and this chance to perform. Members of the jury, indeed.