Credit: Sara Von Burg
The Mock Trial team of Stissing Mountain High School emerged triumphant at the Red Hook Town Justice Court, where late last month they took home the Dutchess County championship after defeating peers from Beacon.
Presiding over the case on April 26 was Judge Jonah Triebwasser, Red Hook’s town and village justice since 2007. Unlike the murder the Mock Trial group faced last year, students this time were engaged in a civil case involving libel, which required in-depth knowledge of constitutional and case law.
The responsibility of researching and developing the argument for the case was distributed across the 16 members of the Mock Trial team. On the day of the trial, some students performed roles as witnesses, while others acted as attorneys.
Cam Decker, a senior at Stissing Mountain who gave the opening statement for the prosecution, praised Mock Trial as a great opportunity to practice public speaking, but said the case required a lot of preparation.
Decker, who received an outstanding attorney award for her work by Triebwasser, said the nuance of entering evidence was her favorite part of the case. “But I’d love to be able to impeach someone,” she added. “That’d be really fun.”
This year’s victory was Stissing Mountain’s first title in seven years. The school has won at the county level at least seven times since John Schoonmaker, one of the school’s longtime junior/senior teachers, began the Mock Trial program in 2003.
Co-advising the team with Schoonmaker was Ryan Orton, a social studies teacher at Stissing Mountain, and Sarah Jones, a member of the Pine Plains Town Board and a retired public defender and attorney-in-charge at the Manhattan Criminal Defense Office who has taught at New York Law School.
Orton and Schoonmaker both credited Jones, who has coached the Stissing Mountain Mock Trial teams for more than a decade, with using her courtroom know-how to prepare the students. Jones worked with them three days a week leading up to the championship, helping the group to learn, in part, how to go off-script.
Though every trial in the championship involved arguing the same case, each competition handed the Stissing Mountain team unpredictable variables: who they were up against, and who was judging the case.
To Orton, this meant the students had to be prepared to improvise and think on their feet. If the judge sustained an objection to a key argument in one of their prepared statements, the students would have to know how to make a real-time pivot.
“Unlike in sports, once the trial started, we weren’t allowed to say a thing to the students. So if they were arguing a point well, we’d be thinking: ‘Yes, they nailed that!’ But if they got something wrong, we just had to sit there biting our nails,” said Orton.
To both Orton and Schoonmaker, Mock Trial represents an opportunity for students to devote extracurricular effort to a competitive activity other than sports – one that exercises the muscles of the mind while also teaching problem-solving skills applicable to the real world.
Normally, Stissing Mountain would next head to a regional competition, which could then lead to state championships. But with scheduling complications making it impossible this year, the team’s regional ambitions will have to wait until next year.
This article comes courtesy of The Millerton News.