For three days last week, Little Rock became arguably one of the most litigious cities in the nation, as 47 teams of high school students from 44 states, the Northern Mariana Islands and South Korea converged on the capital city in hopes of taking home the prize of being named the top trial team in the nation.

This was the first time Arkansas has hosted the National High School Mock Trial Championship.

On Friday and Saturday, high school trial teams competed in 12 courtrooms at the Richard Sheppard Arnold U.S. District Courthouse in Little Rock and just blocks away in 10 courtrooms in the Pulaski County Courthouse in a series of four elimination rounds leading up to the main event Saturday night: the final championship round in the Garnett Thomas Eisele Courtroom at the federal courthouse, followed by an awards ceremony in the Wally Allen Ballroom at the Statehouse Convention Center.

After the dust settled following the championship round Saturday night between the two top teams in the nation, Ankeny High School in Ankeny, Iowa, and Albuquerque Academy from Albuquerque, N.M., the team from Ankeny High eked out a narrow victory over Albuquerque Academy to take home the top honors for 2023. Third place went to Montgomery Bell Academy from Nashville, Tenn.

Other awards were given out to the top 10 mock trial attorneys, the top 10 mock trial witnesses, the top three mock trial sketch artists and the top three mock trial courtroom journalists.

The team from Waukesha South High School in Waukesha, Wis., was awarded the Larry Bakko Professionalism and Civility Award, the only peer-nominated and selected award in the competition, in which the competing teams selected the team that demonstrated the highest level of civility and professionalism during the event. The award is named in honor of Larry Bakko of Wisconsin Dells, Wis., a longtime volunteer with the National High School Mock Trial Association, who died in 2013.

As the host state, Arkansas was allowed to field its two top-ranked state teams, said Jordan Tinsley, president of the Arkansas Mock Trial Foundation, which hosted the event. This year, Arkansas was represented by Conway High School and Springdale Har-Ber High School, which ranked number one and two respectively at the state competition. In the national competition, Conway High School placed 33rd and Har-Ber High School placed 40th.

Team members for Conway High School were Pennelope Wilson, Daniel Taft, Caley Miller, Natalie Hood, Avery Ferguson, Zirui Feng, Tanaya Deshpande, Rebecca Corona and Lexi Aikman. Matt Brown was the team coach and Casey Griffith the lead teacher.

Har-Ber’s team members included Mason Wait, Nora Shitandi, Adreana Perez, Carlos Pacheco, Samuel Myers, Yasmine Mejia, Megan Lucas and Gabby Cenobio. Non-competing team members were Elise Rhames and Robert Lucas. Monica Wiederkehr was the team coach and Joel Brown was the lead teacher.

Tinsley, a Little Rock defense attorney, said mock trial training offers a large array of benefits to students, enabling them to develop skills such as critical thinking, analysis and communication to name a few, regardless of the career field students eventually enter.

This year’s event featured more than 400 students, with many of the teams coming to Little Rock accompanied by full contingents of supporters to observe the competition.

The event officially kicked off Thursday at the Old Statehouse Museum with a pin exchange on the lawn. Tinsley said the pin exchange is a social event that gives student competitors the opportunity to meet and greet one another and exchange lapel pins that are representative of each state of origin. Tinsley, who was a competitor in the national competition in 1997 as a ninth grader and in 2000 as a high school senior, said the pin exchange is intended to break the ice and give the high schoolers a taste of networking.

“When I competed,” Tinsley said, “I had a cup full of pins at the end.”

Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Mayor Frank Scott gave opening remarks, welcoming the students to Little Rock. Sanders mentioned to the students that she and Tinsley were part of the first all-ninth grade team ever to compete from Arkansas.

“Thankfully, only one of us ended up becoming an attorney,” Sanders joked. “However, be careful what you sign up for because Jordan became the attorney and I became a politician, so the future could be pretty grim.”

Sanders credited Tinsley with helping prepare her “for a lifetime of arguing with other people.”

In an earlier interview, Tinsley talked about the 1997 competition.

“The case that year was, what if Elvis was murdered instead of died of an overdose?” he said. “It was totally fictional. The case alleged that Elvis’ manager poisoned him, I think using GHB, and it was sort of covered up. It was a kind of a silly case but it was a lot of fun.”

Asked what the verdict was that year, Tinsley laughed and said although teams are scored on a wide range of criteria by a panel of jurors, no verdict is rendered.

This year’s competition case involved a fictional criminal case titled the State of Arkansas vs. Scout Cumberland, which involved the homicide of a school board member by another school board member, with New Mexico’s prosecution team arguing for premeditated murder and Iowa’s defense team claiming self-defense. The trial was presided over by Chief U.S. District Judge D. Price Marshall Jr., and the jury was made up of a panel of judges and attorneys from around the nation as well as from Arkansas.

Arkansas’ panel members included Chief Arkansas State Supreme Court Justice John Dan Kemp; former Associate Justice Annabelle Imber Tuck, who is the first woman ever elected to the Arkansas Supreme Court; U.S. Attorney Jonathan Ross; Lisa Peters with the Federal Public Defenders Office in Little Rock; state Solicitor General Nicholas Bronni; Arkansas Bar Association President Joe Kolb; Arkansas Bar Association President-Elect Margaret Dobson; and Arkansas Bar Foundation President Ed Oglesby.

Under National High School Mock Trial Association rules, teams consist of six to nine official members assigned to roles representing the prosecution/plaintiff and defense/defendant sides, with six members participating in any given round. In each round, three members serve as attorneys and three serve as witnesses. Time limits are strictly enforced. The trial scenario switches from year-to-year between criminal and civil trials.

The National High School Mock Trial Competition began in 1984 in Des Moines, Iowa, with five states competing: Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska and Wisconsin. Nebraska took top honors that year.

The field doubled to 10 states the following year as Nebraska hosted the competition, with Texas taking first place. By 1987, 34 states and Washington, D.C., competed in the nation’s capital, with Arizona and Iowa taking the No. 1 and No. 2 spots. Arkansas is the 27th state to host the competition in its 38-year history. Seven states — Arizona, Indiana, Louisiana, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Carolina and Wisconsin — have hosted the competition twice, and Georgia has hosted three times.