A Day in Court

On Thursday 18th May 2023, our VCE-VM class and 1 VCE student from Legal Studies attended an excursion at the Supreme Court of Victoria, located in the heart of Melbourne. During our time there, we had the chance to role play a trial to put Mr Byers in jail for manslaughter. Our class had different types of roles throughout the courtroom. Amer and I were the Judge’s Associates, Jude was the prosecutor, Dante was defence, and Issa was the witness and everyone else was the jury. They decided that Mr Byers was guilty. The judge was played an actual Supreme Court judge, Justice Rita Incerti. 

 After the role play, we met the judge and asked her a couple of tricky questions that were related to the courts and why she wanted to be a lawyer. There were other people in the courtroom as well - Jonathan Barreiro is a criminal barrister and also an A-League Referee as a second job. 

After the roleplay, Sandra and Dean, who were our tour guides, took us around the Supreme Court and into the Supreme Court Library. The library had probably every book you can think about law and corrections and all of the law divisions there are in the State of Victoria. We got the chance to explore the library ourselves until it was time to observe a court trial that was in progress. We were completely silent throughout the trial as it should be and were just listening to whatever the judge was instructing the witness to do. The court trial was for a murder that had occurred. We only got to see one of the accused walk into the courtroom. There were three accused in total. We didn't get to hear much about it as it was only witnesses explaining what they saw in the room that the murder occurred. It looked a bit like the TV shows but it was a lot slower and longer. It was still a great experience and we would love to get more excursions like that in the future.

Key witness Issa Sobh is sworn in by Judge’s Associate Matthew Khwaja to provide evidence in The Crown v Byers in the Supreme Court of Victoria.