Editorial
Front Page - Friday, November 19, 2010
Mock trial team places third in international competition
David Laprad
Scott Maucere, one of the coaches of the Chattanooga Southeast Tennessee Home Education Association mock trial team, poses with two of the eight students who competed in the Empire City Invitational in New York in October. From L to R: Hannah Thomas, who won the New York’s Finest 1st Place Best Overall Witness trophy, and Hannah Atherton who received the trophy for Fourth Place Best Overall Witness. CSTHEA placed third in the prestigious event.
- David Laprad
To prepare for her role as a witness in the international Empire City Invitational high school mock trial tournament, junior Hannah Atherton watched “Sunset Boulevard,” in which a screenwriter writes a screenplay for a former silent film star who’s faded into obscurity. Atherton studied the character of Norma Desmond, famously played by Gloria Swanson, to get a feel for playing a showy, pretentious Hollywood has-been.
While Swanson received a Best Actress nomination from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for her performance, she didn’t win the Oscar. Atherton, however, did return home with a trophy: Fourth Place Best Overall Witness. She wasn’t ready for her close-up, though.
“I wasn’t even paying attention when they called my name [at the award’s ceremony]. I was surprised,” says Atherton.
Her teammate, Hannah Thomas, also played a witness in the trial, in which defendant Jackie Owens, a fictitious actor and movie director, is charged with the murder of his business partner, Jacob Bennett. Whereas Atherton played a former starlet, Thomas performed the role of a prisoner. She caught more than the acting bug, though; on the day of her team’s trial, she had a fever of more than 100 degrees. One of the team’s coaches, Chattanooga attorney Scott Maucere, didn’t want her to compete, but she insisted.
“I felt terrible, and I hadn’t gotten any sleep, so I looked awful. But I think that helped my performance,” Thomas says.
The judges, who scored the competition using a system Maucere says rivals the Bowl Championship Series in complexity, agreed, and named Thomas New York’s Finest 1st Place Best Overall Witness.
The team on which Atherton and Thomas competed, Chattanooga Southeast Tennessee Home Education Association, won third place in the prestigious tournament, held Oct. 15-17 in Brooklyn. CSTHEA was one of 30 teams from five countries, including the U.S., Canada, U.K., Ireland and South Korea, that took part in the event. The Chattanooga team won all four of its trials, facing teams from Colorado, Ireland, Wisconsin and New York. The competition was held in the courtrooms of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York.
In addition to Atherton and Thomas, CSTHEA team members included witnesses Mitchell Horner, Seth Jones and David Tulis, as well as attorneys Stephanie Fast, Vivian Hughbanks and Amanda Paul. Maucere and Hamilton County Chancellor Jeff Atherton, whom the kids affectionately call “Mr. A,” coached the team. Former CSTHEA mock trial members Josh and Meaghan Jones helped.
A mock trial is a simulated hearing between two teams, one representing the prosecution, or plaintiff, and the other representing the defendant. The teams apply real case law and rules of evidence to a fabricated pattern of facts.
In the Empire case – State of Midlands v. Jackie Owens – three entrepreneurs joined forces to launch Trifecta Entertainment, a major movie studio. Just as Trifecta was starting to gain steam, one of its partners went missing. When the police discovered the missing partner’s corpse buried at the base of Calkins Cliffs, a grand jury indicted the two remaining partners for murder.
To prepare for the competition, CSTHEA began pouring over the particulars of the case and planning its strategies in mid-July. As the tournament drew near, the students and coaches met up to six evenings per week and practiced for as long as three hours per night. Maucere says the youth took the competition “seriously.”
Competing in the Empire City Invitational is no small matter. Teams can apply, but must be invited, and are chosen based on the strength of their program. Fortunately, CSTHEA has a long history of success in mock trial contests. In 2002 and 2003, the team won back-to-back national championships, and then won the American Mock Trial Invitational in 2007.
The following year, it placed third in the same event. Maucere says CSTHEA was granted access to the Empire event based on its sixth place finish in the Tennessee statewide competition in 2009.
Over 100 teams submitted an application to participate in the contest, but Empire officials chose just 30. To be a contender at that level of competition, teams must be committed, hard working and bright. Chancellor Atherton, the starlet’s father, said the group rose to the occasion.
“This team demonstrated as high a level of courtesy, class and courage as any of the teams I’ve coached in over 20 years.”
In addition to improving their problem-solving and critical thinking skills while preparing for the Empire competition, Atherton and Thomas say they both learned how to relate to people from other countries, as they had the opportunity to interact with the team from Ireland.
As enriching as the experience of participating in mock
trial has been for the two Hannahs, neither one is planning to become a lawyer, although Maucere says the opposite is true for the team members who played the attorneys. However, Atherton and Thomas are up for another season of competition. Practice begins soon, a mere three weeks following the New York event.
No one said being an actor is easy.
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