State v Mann

Student, Liz Papell, handing in her argument to "Judge" Dean Smith.

In my FYS we had a "trial" based around the State v Mann case. My team, the best team was on the defense of John Mann, while we argued against the State side. Our objective was to convince the "judge" why John Mann should not be charged ten dollars for the shooting of slave, Lydia. We used many historical and legal examples to back our case up, we stated that slave owners had the right to punish slaves where deemed necessary, which we found off of the information gathered. The opposing team argued that Mann had no right, shooting is not a form of punishment. Looking back at the actual case now, we see Mann in fact did have to pay the ten dollars for the shooting of Lydia. I thought this was an interesting learning technique, it allowed the class to be interactive, and research multitudes of laws and historical backgrounds to enrich our knowledge on this time period, and case.