The Honor Committee voted during last night's meeting to table indefinitely an amendment to change the composition of juries for honor trials.
The proposed amendment would have taken away juries entirely made up of randomly selected students. It also would have required that either two or three Honor Committee members serve on each jury.
The amendment will not be on the agenda next week and will not show up unless someone proposes it again.
Committee Chair Charles Harris was initially supportive of the measure after hearing about negative experiences with juries made up of randomly selected students. The proposal was intended to make the trial process more fair by helping to solve the problem of engagement among students not affiliated with the Committee who serve on juries. But during last night's meeting, Harris noted that the amendment, which was initially brought up at the Committee's Oct. 3 meeting, did not appear to have any student support.
"Talk around the table does not lead me to think we have a lot of steam behind this," Harris said.
If the amendment had passed through the Committee, it would have then had to win the support of 60 percent of the entire student body, with a voter turnout of at least 10 percent.
"I have yet to see anyone outside of the Committee vocally support this at all," College representative Greg Siegel said.
Alexander Cohen, a representative of the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences, added that the amendment would be a reallocation of power in favor of the Committee, and the Committee should consider the consequences of such a move carefully before passing any measure.
But even though many Committee members agreed that many students thought of this proposal as something akin to a power-grab, Harris said this was not the intent behind the amendment.
"We're not talking about eliminating randomly selected students," Harris said. "I object to some of the ideas that we don't represent the student body. The reason I get frustrated in some of this debate is because we are elected by our peers to represent them."
Architecture representative Kevin Kinsey pointed out that, right or wrong, passing the amendment would require a significant outreach movement that would have taken up the Committee's entire term.
"I think we could do better with our time," he said.
The Committee briefly mentioned a few other potential ways to deal with jury engagement. Cohen proposed requiring juries to reach unanimous decisions or placing Honor Committee members on juries as non-voting members. Another possibility would be to allow the trial chair to ask probing questions.
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