Hampden Academy wins mock trial again

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PORTLAND – Witness Casey Douglas was straying from the point, not answering the question.

Attorney Paige Clifton pointedly repeated it.

“When you were in the 11th grade, you were caught smoking at school. Yes or no?”

“Oh, that was the stupidest thing I’ve ever done and I …”

Clifton interrupted to pin down the alibi witness for the defense.

“Just answer the question yes or no,” the plaintiff’s attorney demanded.

“Yes. But I …”

“And, you lied to a teacher about it?”

“I panicked!” Douglas exclaimed, squirming in the witness chair.

Clifton pressed on.

“You lied to a teacher. Yes or no?”

The witness, portrayed by Rebecca Weidler, a freshman at Catherine McAuley High School, hung her head.

“Yes. At first,” she admitted. “But, then I …”

“No further questions,” Clifton declared.

The Hampden Academy junior on Tuesday returned to her seat at the plaintiff’s table in the chambers of the Maine Supreme Judicial Court. Her staccato questioning style and confidence at the mock trial final helped the high school win the Maine State High School Mock Trial Competitions for the fourth time in five years.

Hampden’s mock trial team will represent Maine in the National Mock Trial Competitions in May in Charlotte, N.C.

“I’d like to get some of you to teach some of the lawyers who come before me how it should be done,” Maine Supreme Court Justice Susan Calkins said on Tuesday to the teams while awarding plaques to Hampden and McAuley, a Catholic girls high school in Portland. “It was a real pleasure for me to be here today. In a few years, if you’re looking for a clerkship, please give me a call.”

A coach for the Hampden team praised McAuley’s performance in that school’s first appearance in the state final.

“They were difficult opponents,” William Devoe, a Bangor lawyer, said Wednesday. “They get all the credit in the world for having made it as far as they did.”

Sponsored by the Maine State Bar Association, the University of Maine Law School and the Maine Bar Foundation, this year’s competition drew 350 students from 27 Maine schools.

Each year, students on mock trial teams are presented with a legal case, according to Julia Underwood, who coordinates the program. They are given an outline of the case, background on witnesses and rules about what can be used as evidence.

With the help of local lawyers who act as coaches, teams research legal precedents and learn the rules of evidence and courtroom procedure.

Students take on the roles of attorneys and witnesses, practice opening and closing arguments and rehearse examinations of witnesses. In competition, the teams must argue the case from both sides.

This year’s case was a fictional civil lawsuit brought by Parker Hamilton, a high school teacher, against a former student alleging libel.

A posting on the school’s Web site the previous school year stated, “”Guess what?!! The Terminator is a drugie!”

The teacher’s nickname was “the terminator” due to her challenging teaching style, and she is a recovering cocaine addict, according to case documents. The student has denied making the posting and being in the library on the night the posting was made from a computer there.

The case posed unusual challenges even for the seasoned members of Hampden’s mock trial team, Devoe said Wednesday.

“The issue is a subtle legal framework, more complex than cases done in [the] recent past,” he said. “It was somewhat daunting for the students in beginning. But they worked so hard to master the facts and get ready.”

John White, a Hampden Academy senior and a team member for four years, said after Tuesday’s win that the program taught him to think on his feet.

“Mock trials make you think really analytically,” he said. “Our coaches taught us in questioning witnesses to be aggressive, keep control over witnesses and take them where we need them to go, not where they think they want to go.”

That formula could be why Hampden’s team, coached by teacher Katherine King and Assistant U.S. Attorney James McCarthy, as well as Devoe, is the Perry Mason of Maine’s mock trial program – it almost never loses.