Courtroom training draws 22 potential student jurors

Twenty-two high school students spent last Saturday afternoon in Whitman County Superior Court.

Fortunately for them, they were not on trial, but were training to become jurors who will decide the fate of fellow students who break school rules.

“It was interesting,” said Zachery Scheer, a senior at Rosalia High School. “Although I think our punishment might have been harsher than what the school would have done.”

Students who admit they have violated school rules will be able to choose a punishment from school officials or to go through the student court and be sentenced by their peers.

The program is being tested by Colfax and Rosalia schools. The program will be held at those school buildings; the mock trial was only held in the court for the sake of example.

Colfax and Rosalia high schools are instituting the student courts this year and are acting as guinea pigs as officials from other area school districts watch.

Saturday’s training session was conducted by Rick Peters, a deputy prosecutor in Thurston County and founder of the Washington State Youth Court Association.

He advised students on how to conduct the local court and to make sure their rulings are fair and even-handed.

Students from those two schools ran through several trial cases, acting both as the accused offenders and as the juries, to get a feel for the program.

Colfax student Raven Elkins was on a simulated “trial” for bullying a younger student. Rosalia’s Gage Merritt went before the jury for a mock trial about stealing another student’s iPod.

Each were questioned by the jury panel, asked how they felt about the crimes and if they felt remorse for what they had done.

The jury then discussed among themselves the testimony they had heard and returned dispositions meant to restore the victims, benefit the community and keep the offenders from being isolated.

Students then had the option of accepting the jury’s disposition or taking the school’s punishment.

Robert Russell, a Garfield/Palouse teacher and organizer of the local youth court, said he put the program together to provide an alternative to traditional discipline methods like suspensions or expulsions and to engage students in the legal process.

That seems to have worked.

“It was kind of a hard thing to do,” said Rosalia student Mattie Eberle. “You have to work to really take an unbiased look at the situation. But I had fun.”