Stissing Mountain takes home Dutchess County mock trial championship

PINE PLAINS —  At the Red Hook Town Justice Court on Wednesday, April 26, Stissing Mountain High School’s mock trial team took home the county championship, competing against Beacon High School. Presiding over the case was Judge Jonah Triebwasser, Red Hook’s town and village justice since 2007.

The trial was over a civil case involving libel (last year’s case was a murder trial), 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, with some performing roles as witnesses and some acting as attorneys on the actual day of the trial.

Cam Decker, a senior at Stissing Mountain who gave the opening statement for the prosecution, described mock trial as a great opportunity to practice public speaking, but that the case required a lot of preparation.

She received an outstanding attorney award for her work by Triebwasser, and indicated that the nuances of entering evidence was her favorite component of the case: “But I’d love to be able to impeach someone, that’d be really fun.”

This year’s victory was not Stissing Mountain’s first—John Schoonmaker, one of Stissing Mountain’s longtime junior/senior teachers, began the mock trial program in 2003. Since then, Stissing Mountain won at the county level seven times between 2006 and 2016, making the April 26 win the school’s first title in seven years.

Co-advising the team with Schoonmaker was Ryan Orton, a social studies teacher at Stissing Mountain, as well as Sarah Jones, a retired attorney who has taught at New York University and Columbia University. Orton and Schoonmaker both credited Jones for preparing the students with courtroom knowhow, working with them three days a week leading up to the championship.

Part of that involved helping the students learn how to go off-script. Though every trial involved arguing over the same case, who the Stissing Mountain team was up against and who judged the case changed at every competition.

To Orton, this meant that 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 is, that exercises the muscles of the mind while also teaching problem-solving skills applicable to the real world.

As for what’s next, 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.