At their meeting Sunday evening, the Honor Committee voted 19-1 to change their bylaws to allow students to admit additional offenses under a single informed retraction, or IR.
“[The change] allows Honor to be a lot more forgiving and rehabilitative for students going through the process, which has always been our goal for this Committee,” Devin Rossin, Honor Committee chair and a fourth-year College student, said in an interview with The Cavalier Daily. “I’m glad we got it with [nearly] unanimous support, with only one dissenting vote. It’s just a massive expansion to what we currently do.”
Owen Gallogly, a Law student and Honor Committee representative, introduced the bylaw change at the previous Committee meeting. Gallogly was one of the original drafters of the IR, which allows a student reported to the Honor Committee to admit guilt, make amends and take a two-semester leave of absence.
Currently, if a student is found guilty of an Honor offense but has already submitted an IR for a different offense, they will be asked to leave the University. Starting April 1, when the bylaw change is scheduled to go into effect, a student will be allowed to admit additional offenses under the same IR.
“There are three separate changes that work together to effectuate this additional admissions idea,” Gallogly said in an interview.
The first change directs that a student can take a single IR if the original and additional offenses fall into a single nexus of events, in which multiple offenses are inextricably linked so as to be dependent on each other. The definition of single nexus of events is currently in the process of being expanded and, if passed by the Committee, will go into effect April 1.
If the offenses do not fall into a single nexus of events, the student may submit a conscientious retraction — the procedure by which a student who has no reason to believe they are suspected of committing an Honor offense but thinks they have committed an offense admits guilt and makes amends — for each additional offense.
If a student is later reported for an offense they’ve admitted through the additional admissions procedure, the report will be thrown out.
The second change outlines the definition of validity for a conscientious retraction, or CR.
The language directs that a CR taken as part of an additional admissions case is valid so long as the student has no reason to believe they are suspected of an Honor offense before the Committee notifies the student that it has received the report of Honor offenses described in the IR letter. With the bylaw change, talking to Honor about a potential offense before submitting a CR — which would be necessary in order to admit an additional offense outside the single nexus of events — will not make the CR invalid in cases involving additional admissions.
“For a CR to be a defense at trial, it has to be valid,” Gallogly said in an interview. “What valid means is it was filed before the student had any reason to believe that they were under suspicion of an Honor offense. For example, if a professor were to tell them, it would be invalid and would have no impact on the trial.”
The third change mandates that if a CR is found to be invalid in an additional admissions case, it will be excluded from trial.
“If I make a CR in this process and it turns out it wasn’t valid because the professor talked to me before, the community is not going to be able to bring that evidence forward of my admission at trial and say, ‘See, he already admitted to the offense, so he’s guilty,’” Gallogly said in an interview. “That’s just all going to be excluded. The student is not going to end up any worse off via this procedure.”
Before the bylaw changes were brought to a vote, the Committee had an extensive discussion of the proposal. Gallogly and Sarah Killian — a fourth-year College student, Honor’s vice chair for investigations and a member of the Sub-Committee on Policies and Procedures — fielded questions about the changes.
Several members of the Committee expressed concerns about the proposal, including a need to address the “single nexus of events” definition first and concerns related to support officer training, the timing of when the change would go into effect, the substantiveness of the proposal and the frequency of problems the changes seek to address.
“It doesn’t feel like a meaty [proposal],” said Christopher Benos, a fourth-year College student and Honor Committee representative.
Several Committee members expressed concerns about the post-dating of the proposal until April 1, saying they wanted it to go into effect earlier, which would require a separate vote. The Committee did not vote on moving up the implementation date at their meeting Sunday and considered the amendment to its bylaws as originally proposed.
The Committee also discussed whether to vote on the three-pronged proposal Sunday evening or wait until the next week. Rossin said he was concerned about voting next week, saying there would probably be many Committee members absent from committee for the Thanksgiving holiday.
The Committee ultimately decided to move forward with a vote. Of the committee members present, 19 voted in favor and one voted against the proposal, passing with majority support.
Benos voted no and said he wants the Committee to discuss the post-dating of the bylaw changes so they would not be at the end of this Committee’s term.
“I voted no because I felt like this language did not fully address some of the concerns that students and faculty have explained about how the IR currently functions, and if I were to vote yes on a proposal, it would have had to be much more comprehensive [and] addressed the single nexus of events,” Benos said in an interview.
Rossin said he wants to allot for enough time to train Honor support officers so they can carry out the policy “in a very clear and cohesive way.”
“I think that the implementation should probably be later instead of sooner, in that it just gives support officers a longer amount of time to be trained on this,” Rossin said in an interview. “Starting with this next support officer pool, we’re going to be discussing what this IR bylaw change is, walking through the substance of it and then, beginning pretty soon after that, walking towards the implementation of that policy.”
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