LANSING - Students are taking their studies of the judicial system out of the classroom and into the Hall of Justice with a program run by the Michigan Supreme Court Learning Center.

High schoolers dressed in business clothes and judicial robes last week, and acted as Supreme Court justices and attorneys in a mock hearing of the appeal People v. Carp. Raymond Carp, the appellant in the case, was convicted of first-degree murder for the death of Mary Ann McNeely in 2006. Carp was 15 at the time of the murder, and he received a mandatory life sentence without parole.

At the mock hearing, students looked at the facts of the Carp case, and presented arguments about how a 2012 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, which determined that mandatory life sentences without parole for juveniles violated the Eighth Amendment, should be applied to it.

"The idea of the program is the students act both as attorneys and justices and learn exactly the types of things that they are doing," said Learning Center Coordinator Rachael Drenovsky, "so they learn hands-on and they also have presentations by justices and attorneys. So, they see from the professional perspective, and they also get to try it out themselves.”

Although the students presented Raymond Carp’s appeal in their mock hearing, the real case is currently pending before the Michigan Supreme Court.