In honor trials, student juries handed down fewer guilty verdicts this year than last, according to Honor Committee case statistics released Sunday night.
The number of students asked to leave the University dropped from 19 in the 1998-1999 school year to seven in the 1999-2000 school year, a difference of 63 percent.
The statistics track the number of cases that go through the honor system from the investigative phase through the post-trial phase. The annual statistics also classify honor cases according to race, gender, school and athletic status.
In the 1999-2000 school year, the overall number of cases the Committee investigated dropped by over 11 percent, from 69 in the 1998-1999 school year to 61 last year.
The drop in initiations follows a normal cycle of fluctuation, said Honor Committee Chairman Thomas Hall. He did not attribute the lower number to reduced student faith in the system.
Hall did say that positive and negative publicity of the honor system could have an effect on case numbers.
The Committee currently is named as a defendant in two separate lawsuits from expelled students.
Luke Mitchell, Committee vice chair for education, said he did not think the drop in numbers could be attributed to a particular lawsuit or any other specific factor.
"When I'm sitting on [an Investigation] panel the last thing on my mind is a lawsuit, and you can probably say the same for student juries. I don't think most students know or care enough about the lawsuits that have occurred to let it affect their decisions," Mitchell said.
The case statistics also reveal that more honor cases are initiated against minorities, as compared to minority representation in the student body as a whole. During the 1999-2000 school year, 10 of the 61 honor cases investigated -- or 16 percent -- involved black students, while 13 cases investigated involved Asian and Asian-American students, for a total of 21 percent of cases involving minorities.
Last year black students made up 8.5 percent of the student body and Asian American students made up 8.3 percent of the student body.
This overrepresentation of minorities has "historically been shown to be the trend" in the honor system and "racial spotlighting is always a concern" of the Committee, Hall said.
Racial spotlighting and the overrepresentation of black students in cases is a "recurring issue," said Black Student Alliance President Michael Costa.
Both Costa and Janis Millete, president of the Asian Student Union, said they look forward to working with the Honor Diversity Awareness Committee to decrease the racial disparity in case initiations this year.
Stephanie Hsu, co-chair of the awareness committee and advisor to the ASU, said the trend is "definitely a concern of the Committee and very alarming".
"There has been a history of misunderstanding between the Honor [Committee] and racial groups," Hsu said. "This year these concerns are at the forefront of the Committee's agenda. We want to build a trust between honor and these racial groups this year"
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