Members of the Honor Committee debated a proposal Sunday night to eliminate random, all-student jury panels. The proposal would leave accused students with two options: a panel consisting entirely of Committee members or of both Committee and non-Committee members. Although the Committee should be commended for considering novel approaches to tackle the issue of underprepared jurors, removing randomly selected panels does not address the root of the problem.
One of the primary concerns is the threat of infringing on student rights, Medical School representative Weldon Diana argued. Students expect to be tried by a jury of their peers, but there could be a perception that the Committee's perspective would be different from that of a randomized student jury. Eliminating randomly chosen all-student juries would undermine the spirit of honor system and could fuel student distrust of the process.
A panel of non-Committee members likely would be more sympathetic to accused students than would be a panel comprised solely of Committee members who joined an organization dedicated to the ideal of community justice. Having less leniency is not necessarily a bad thing - University students ought to be held to high standards in personal conduct. Nevertheless, more than a few students perceive the honor system to be somewhat detached from the University community at large. A move to do away with randomly selected juries could be seen as reducing transparency and accountability. It removes an element of public input and scrutiny from trial processes.\nCommittee Chair Charles Harris said a driving force for the proposal was the lack of knowledge among jurors. "Students are disengaged because they are not quite sure what they should be doing," he said. "They are not quite sure of what they are being expected to do."
It also was argued that having Committee members on juries would be a resource for other students on the panel if questions about procedural issues or definitions in the bylaws arose. But trials are already led by a trial chair, who serves this functions.
The proposition, however, is not sufficient to remedy the problem of inadequate juror education. Rather than skirting around the problem and changing the balance of jury panels, the Committee ought to do more to inform students of the nuances of the honor code before they step foot in the trial rooms. The Committee must instead channel its efforts toward education starting at the grassroots level or, more to the point, it should revise the existing system of jury preparation. Student panels' unfamiliarity with honor trials may reflect the general lack of awareness about the system's intricacies.
Jurors may benefit from a dialogue about the honor's system's principles, such as the definitions of "intent" and "triviality," prior to serving on trials, as College representative Alex Solomon suggested.
At the heart of these complications is the potentially subjective criteria for which a student can be convicted: act, intent and triviality. The ambiguity of these definitions has been the source of much controversy and likely contributes to difficulties jurors face when determining the fates of accused students.
The underlying principle of the honor system is the responsibility of students to hold themselves and each other accountable for their actions. The jury panel proposal an evasive solution; the larger battle facing the Committee is adequately educating students before they end up in the trial room, either as jurors or as defendants.
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