Portland mock trial team prepares for first national competition in decades

Yahoo

07-05-2025

May 7—The case: A young investigative reporter is shot while working on a blockbuster investigation.
The prime suspect: A wealthy real estate developer and true crime podcaster who may have killed before.
The attorneys: Casco Bay High School students.
This week, the group of eight is representing Maine at the 2025 National High School Mock Trial Championships — the first Portland students to do so since the 1980s.
Mock trial is an extracurricular competition that combines legal analysis, public speaking and theater. All competing schools receive the same case and materials, including an indictment and witness statements, then work to build a case for both the prosecution and the defense.
At the competition, they'll end up representing both sides over a series of head-to-head matches against other high school teams. There's no "correct" verdict — teams are scored on the quality of their arguments.
Casco Bay came in second place at the statewide competition last fall at the Cumberland County Courthouse. When the first-place winner, Brunswick High School, had to drop out, Casco Bay became Maine's sole representative to the national competition, which begins Wednesday in Arizona.
'ONE BIG PUZZLE'
Jacob McNally is a math teacher and the faculty coach for the Casco Bay team. He first started overseeing mock trial at Deering High School and said the activity — which requires close reading, strategy and performing skills — typically attracts students who are interested in theater, law or just an extracurricular.
The cases are intricate, involving more than 50 pages of detailed witness statements, exhibits and a convincing criminal indictment, which McNally said requires a real commitment from the team.
This year, he said, a combination of great student leadership and attorney coaching propelled the team further than ever before.
Jo Ellis is one of those student leaders and said her interest in mock trial is related to the complexity of the cases.
"They're so meticulously thought out, the cases, that each little detail contradicts with another one or has multiple details stemming off of it, and you have to be aware of everything down to the date the witnesses gave their statement," she said. "And that's really fun for me, because it just feels like one big puzzle that you're putting together."
Ellis, a senior, got involved in mock trial during her sophomore year because her brother and some friends were on the team. She'll be portraying a prosecutor at the national championships and said although the scale of this competition is larger than what the team has faced before, she knows Casco Bay is "100% putting its best foot forward."
Fellow senior Maribel Creek has been a part of the mock trial team since her freshman year. At different points in the national competition, she'll be portraying the defendant and attorneys for both the prosecution and defense.
Creek, who is also involved in theater, said performing the role of a witness comes naturally to her; it's just about playing a part. But being an attorney has been a fun challenge.
"The reason why I've stayed in it so long is just because of the community. There's super fun, smart people in it," Creek said. "But I also like the debating, I like the arguing and I like having to think on my feet while also acting, I think that's fun."
Kendall Shaughnessy, also a senior, said she's drawn to the intricacy, strategy and competition.
"There's the public speaking aspect of delivering a speech, but then there's the live element element of objections, and you have to understand them and know how to respond and understand the facts," she said. "It has given me a lot more confidence in my ability to do those things, because those aren't really skills that I would exercise otherwise."
MOCK TRIAL, REAL LAWYERS
In addition to McNally, the team gets coaching support from local attorneys Richard O'Meara, Maria Fox and David Hillman.
O'Meara, an attorney at Portland law firm Murray Plumb & Murray, has been coaching Maine mock trial teams for decades at Gray-New Gloucester, Falmouth and most successfully Cape Elizabeth, which he led to nine national competitions. McNally described him as the "Coach K of mock trial," a nod to Mike Krzyzewski, the legendary, former Duke University men's basketball coach.
As the student attorneys practiced their arguments at a prep session Tuesday, O'Meara jumped in with pointers and objection strategies.
"Two questions," O'Meara said, interrupting a cross-examination that combined a few points into one question. "Everyone on cross — the shorter the questions, the better they're going to be."
O'Meara said he likes coaching mock trial because it allows him to sharpen up his own trial skills by teaching others.
Coaching mock trial isn't about training the next generation of attorneys, he said, although sometimes that does happen. At the statewide mock trial competition last fall, Maine Supreme Court Chief Justice Valerie Stanfill made a plea to the young Mainers competing about the importance of legal careers. But O'Meara said the biggest goal is instilling confidence and analysis skills that students can apply to any career path.
The Casco Bay seniors aren't necessarily considering careers in law — Ellis is headed to Vassar College in the fall and plans to study policy, Creek is taking a gap year to travel, and Shaughnessy is going to Oberlin College and is undecided on her academic path. But they all agreed that mock trial has increased their confidence and improvised speaking skills and their knowledge of the legal system.
Casco Bay's team raised funds for its trip to Phoenix by soliciting from local law firms and attorney associations, who donated enough to cover the $15,000 price tag.
"The fact that the Maine legal community made it so easy to do this was amazing," McNally said.
O'Meara said Maine sometimes feels like an underdog at the national level because other states have more robust statewide competitions, which can be discouraging for the students. But he said he keeps telling them: "You can compete."
"It's you, it's how well you're going to do," he said. "I try to pump them up, because they can do it."
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