LSU Law students Connor McCain and Chad Thornton won the Fall 2021 Ira S. Flory Mock Trial championship on Thursday, Oct. 7.
LSU Law students Connor McCain and Chad Thornton claimed the Fall 2021 Ira S. Flory Mock Trial Competition championship on Thursday, Oct. 7, after besting fellow students Sarah Hufft and Sammons Corbett in the final round of competition in the Robinson Courtroom at the Paul M. Hebert Law Center.
The distinguished panel of judges who presided over the competition finals were Judge Donald R. Johnson (’82) of the 19th Judicial District Court for the State of Louisiana; Kathleen Barrios Heap (’08), Assistant District Attorney at the East Baton Rouge District Attorney’s Office; and Lindsay Jarrell Blouin (’12), trial attorney at Manasseh, Gill, Knipe & Bélanger.
The students argued a hypothetical criminal case of The State of Louisiana v. Conrad Grayson, in which the defendant, Conrad Grayson, was charged with Solicitation of Murder for the murder of his wife, Victoria Grayson. McCain and Thornton represented the prosecution while Hufft and Corbett represented the defendant, who was accused of soliciting the couple’s gardener to hit Victoria in the head with a hammer and push her into the pool, killing her as a result.
Named in honor of the late professor of the Law Center, the Ira S. Flory Mock Trial Competition is a mock trial competition open to all second-and-third-year law students. A Flory Trial is held each semester, with the fall Flory trial traditionally being a criminal case and the spring Flory trial traditionally being a civil case. Throughout the competition, teams of LSU Law students present a full mock trial—including opening statements, witness examinations, evidentiary presentations, and closing arguments—before panels of attorney evaluators. For this fall’s competition, 14 teams of LSU Law students competed over the past month.
You can rewatch a livestream of the final round of competition here.
