In response to the Board of Visitors' concerns about the fairness of the Honor Committee's appeal process, the Committee has taken steps to ensure that its members will not be reviewing cases on which they have previously worked.
Last winter, the Board suggested the Committee consider allowing an outside body to hear appeals of Honor cases to avoid possible bias during the appeals process, which allows the vice chair for trials to screen the appeal, even if he or she was involved in the case at an earlier stage.
But Sunday night the Committee changed its bylaws in an attempt to address the Board's concerns without allowing an outside body to review their decisions.
Previously, the vice chair for trials had the power to screen appeals before either dismissing them or sending them on to a pre-appeal panel.
Under the new bylaw, the move will take this discretionary power away from the vice chair for trials and distribute it among Committee members.
The change will free the vice chair for trials to sit on Investigative Panels and to chair trials. The vice chair for trials could not do this before, without risking bias, if an appeal was raised about a case they had participated in.
The vice chair for trials now will forward all requests for appeals to a pre-appeal panel composed of two Committee members and a pre-hearing coordinator. This panel will decide whether grounds for an appeal exist and what information will be allowed at the appeal.
The move will benefit the Committee by "distributing some power from the executive committee," Vice Chairwoman for Trials Terra Weirich said.
The old appeals process was subject to abuse, Vice Chairman for Education Peter Leary said.
"If you have a person who interprets 'screen' loosely, they can have a lot of fun with the appeals process," Leary said.
"The way the bylaw was, there was a great deal of leeway for the vice chair for trials to single-handedly approve or call grounds of appeal, but with the change, that power now rests with a group of three Committee members," he said.
But there might be some cases where allowing the vice chair for trials to screen cases would be useful, Vice Chairman for Services Cordel Faulk said.
"I liked discretion," Faulk said. "Sometimes things just need to disappear."
Weirich said she has interpreted the power to screen cases in a strictly substantive sense.
For example, if a dismissed student said, "My counsel was obviously incompetent because I was found guilty," the appeal would not be sent on to a pre-appeal panel, she said. But if a dismissed student said, "My counsel was obviously incompetent because she forgot to motion in our key witness and did not object during trial to testimony ruled out of scope," the dismissed student would receive an appeal, she added.
The Committee plans to further examine the appeals process at its meeting Sunday. They will address whether dismissed students should be granted a retrial if their constitutional rights were violated, but the violations did not affect the outcome of the trial.
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