Yale Bulletin and Calendar

November 17, 2006|Volume 35, Number 11|Two-Week Issue

It is the jurists who will be judged
at student mock trial tournament

Some 600 students from across the country will converge on the campus Dec. 1-2 for the 11th annual Invitational Mock Trial, the largest intercollegiate mock trial tournament in the United States.

The mock trial allows teams of approximately eight students to compete in four rounds of trial, twice as plaintiffs and twice as defendants. The students have the opportunity to play the roles of both attorneys and witnesses in a hypothetical case. This year's trial involves a racially charged police shooting. Attorneys and judges from throughout Connecticut have volunteered to adjudicate the rounds of the tournament.

The opening ceremony for the mock trial and the championship round are open to the public. The opening ceremony will be held at 2 p.m. on Friday, Dec. 1, at the Omni New Haven Hotel, corner of Chapel and Temple streets. The championship round will take place on Saturday, Dec. 2, 6:30-9:30 p.m. in Levinson Auditorium at the Law School, 127 Wall St.

The hypothetical case that the students will argue centers on the police shooting of a fictional teenager named Max Jeffries. In this scenario, Jeffries was chased down by an off-duty police officer after the report of a robbery at a corner store. Jeffries, who matched a witness' description of the perpetrators, was climbing a fence in an alleyway when he was spotted by the police officer, who ordered him to come down from the fence. While Jeffries stopped climbing the fence, he did not come down. The police officer shot him in the side. Jeffries was rushed to the hospital but he fell into a coma, from which he has not recovered. As a result, the teen's parents have filed suit for damages, claiming that their son was deprived of his rights to due process of law.

Tournament participants include students from renowned mock trials teams from Harvard, Princeton, Brown, George Washington and Boston universities, as well as from the University of Pennsylvania.

"Not only does the Yale tournament manage to repeatedly draw some of the finest teams in the nation, but it also continues to bring more and more schools to New Haven each year," says Yale junior Zahreen Ghaznavi, one of the tournament directors.

The co-director of the tournament, junior Adam Nelson, notes that the annual tournament also has a positive economic impact on New Haven. "During the first weekend of December, the Yale Invitational will bring students to downtown New Haven to stay in area hotels and eat in restaurants around the Yale campus," he notes.

For more information about the tournament, contact Kathryn Schmidt at (502) 296-0336 or send e-mail to kathryn.schmidt@yale.edu.

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