The Honor Committee convened Sunday to discuss how panelists should approach questioning during panels for sanctions, specifically whether questions directed at reporters should be limited to "relevant" topics and how to define relevance. The Committee recently decided to allow reporters to be questioned during a Panel for Sanctions, so while there was not a formal change to existing policy, the discussion aimed to finetune this questioning process
This discussion follows an Oct. 23 bylaw change that refined the sanctioning process by granting the Counsel for the Community — Honor Representatives advocating for both the reporter and the Community of Trust — the authority to create and present their own sanctioning arguments. Additionally, the Committee approved a “sanctioning precedent document” that outlines former cases and attached sanctions, to serve as a non-binding precedent document to guide sanctioning decisions.
The Oct. 23 bylaw change aimed to balance the reporter’s perspective — often presented by a University professor — with the broader interests of the Community of Trust. Under the new process, the Counsel for the Community is no longer limited to relying solely on the reporter’s input and can instead develop their own sanctioning arguments. Reporters now contribute through a Reporter Impact Statement, where they state how the student’s offense affected them. The Reporter Impact Statement is read before deliberations, where panelists hear sanctioning arguments from the Counsel for the Community and the guilty student.
Sunday, the Committee agreed that reporters can also be questioned about Reporter Impact Statements during a Panel for Sanctions. Will Hancock, vice chair for the undergraduate community and third-year College student, said that though clarifying questions about Reporter Impact Statements would occur after the reading of the statement, it would be beneficial to have Reporters available for callback throughout the deliberation phases, to ensure that sanctioning decisions are fully informed if questions arise.
“[The panel] asks [the reporter] clarifying questions at the very beginning,” Hancock said. “But [if] something in their Reporter Impact Statement makes it sound like [a] general sanction would work, you want to be able to ask them back for that round of general sanctions to talk about that.”
Laura Howard, Chair of the Committee and fourth-year College student, said the Committee should adopt the questioning model used in hearings, as it is a more convenient model for reporters. The model would allow reporters to answer questions immediately after their statement, leave if they wish and then be available to return via Zoom during deliberations if needed.
The remainder of the reporter questioning discussion centered on defining “relevance” of panelists’ questions during a Panel for Sanctions — specifically, how to determine what constitutes “relevant” questioning, who should evaluate it and whether relevance standards should apply to all parties.
Hancock, who also chairs the Sanctions Working Group — a subcommittee tasked with drafting sanctioning procedures — said that SWG had not reached a consensus on how to determine the relevance of panelist questions in a Panel for Sanctions. SWG anticipates that the Vice Chair for Sanctions would oversee the relevance of questions, according to Hancock.
However, he said that Sunday’s discussion on relevance standards pertained only to questions posed by panelists to reporters, as the dialogue from other parties — Counsel members and students — should not be limited to ensure fairness.
“What we are considering now is just [regarding] panelists asking questions,” Hancock said. “[We are] not scoping the reporter statement, the student statement or the Counsel for the Community’s statement.”
The Committee discussed two potential approaches for determining the relevance of panelist questions. Third-year College Rep. Margaret Zirwas proposed a "front-end" approach, which would involve providing a list of question types that panelists should not ask reporters. These types include leading questions and questions involving “causal psychological arguments” — arguments intended to establish that an accused student’s behavior was caused by an underlying psychological condition. Such questions are currently prohibited in the bylaws for panelist questioning in hearings.
Zirwas said that the front-end approach would allow flexibility in the relevance guidelines and align with current bylaws, ensuring policy consistency without over-restricting panelist questioning beyond things already prohibited.
“We can [state] that [panelists] can't ask leading questions [or] questions that involve causal psychological evidence,” Zirwas said. “Generally, in a Panel for Sanctions, the saying is that nothing is out of scope … I don't know why we wouldn’t just maintain that standard.”
The alternative for relevance questioning policy was a "back-end" approach, where relevant questions from panelists would only be able to include information mentioned in a Panel for Sanctions. Under this approach, panelists would have the flexibility to ask a range of questions, as opposed to having presupposed restrictions on question types, with the Vice Chair for Sanctions ensuring that only questions involving information from the Panel for Sanctions could be asked.
Seamus Oliver, vice chair for investigations and third-year College student, said that this approach would eliminate the need for pre-defining a set of criteria for what constitutes “relevant” questioning and simplify the questioning process.
“In the same way that the hearing [states] the panel shall not consider evidence not presented at the hearing, [panelists would be] limited in deliberations to what [they have heard] that day,” Oliver said.
The Committee did not reach consensus on which approach will be used. Howard said that the Committee will vote on which relevance policy option to include at their next meeting Dec. 1.
The Committee also reviewed a document written by the Policies and Procedures Subcommittee — a group responsible for evaluating and recommending procedural changes to the Committee’s bylaws. P&P presented a “reference document” for panelists to use for sanctioning precedent — the practice of using outcomes and sanctions from previous Honor Code violation cases as a reference point to guide decision-making in current cases.
Currently, the bylaws grant the Panel for Sanctions discretion to choose a sanction based on the distinct circumstances of each case, while also enabling the panel to consult public summaries — “XYZ Case Studies” — of past cases without names or identifiable information as precedent. Sunday’s document did not introduce any new policy but instead compiled these public summaries into a single reference, categorizing them by the type of offense and corresponding sanction. The goal of the document is to provide structure and consistency for panelists during deliberations.
Mary-Holland Mason, third-year College Rep. and co-chair of P&P, said that the reference document served to guide panelists and better structure precedent.
“This is not a binding precedent,” Mason said. “A pretty common question is ‘what has been done with similar cases?’... [The document] is a way to formalize how that conversation is brought in [to the sanctioning process].”
Mason said that the reference document would be updated at the end of each semester. The Committee agreed that the document would help structure sanctioning precedent. As it is a non-binding document, it did not require a bylaw vote, though Howard said that the document will be available at upcoming panels for sanctions.
Howard said the Committee will vote on the relevance policy and potentially other bylaw changes, such as changing attendance policy for the Committee members at the next meeting. The Committee will not meet Nov. 24 due to the Thanksgiving break but will reconvene Dec. 1 at 7 p.m. for their final meeting of the semester.
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