Onion Audition: Mock Trial Club dutifully carries out mock execution

GARLAND, TX — The mock trial club at Lyndon B. Johnson Memorial High School caused a stir this past Monday when they carried out a “mock execution” of a student convicted of several grievous hypothetical felonies. Walker Buchanan, a sophomore at the school, faced what some are calling a “hauntingly realistic” punishment that has left many students rattled. “I just don’t understand why they had to do the execution part,” says junior Betsy Rodriguez. “Like, they did the trial and found him guilty — that’s supposed to be the end of the game. They put a bag over Walker’s head and made him say goodbye to his parents.”

Mock trial club president Alexa Whiteside, an incoming pre-law student at Texas A&M, defended the practice noting, “Sentencing is an integral part of the trial process. We went so far as to simulate the entire trial; we may as well see the sentence through.”

Much of the criticism directed at the club has been less about the decision to pretend end Buchanan’s life, but the hyper-realistic manner in which it was done. Buchanan claims he was locked in a janitor’s closet during each school day for a week after his false sentence was handed down. Unable to attend classes, he was allowed out of his simulated cell for one hour a day to eat in the cafeteria and workout in the “yard,” which was just Memorial’s JV soccer field.

Again, Whiteside defended her club’s actions commenting, “Executions don’t happen the day after a sentence is given. Inmates spend years on death row appealing their sentence. But the volleyball team needed the gym on Friday so we had to speed the process up a bit.” After exhausting all of his fake appeals for a stay of execution, as well as his very real appeals for a toilet instead of a janitor’s mop bucket, Buchanan was taken to the nurses office for what the club coyly referred to as a “non-lethal injection.”

“They gave me a fucking flu shot,” Buchanan alleges.

When reached for comment, Lyndon B. Johnson’s principal and faculty sponsor of the club, James Allen, fervently backed his students. “We try to prepare our students for the real world here. Texas is a death penalty state and capital punishment is a regular occurrence. So far as I can tell, this mock execution was done by the book. And forgive me if I don’t have any sympathy for that sicko Buchanan after what he theoretically did to those non-existent kids.”