U. rights group plans alternate judicial charter

Aiming to ensure due process for accused students, the First Amendment Task Force yesterday announced plans to write its own version of the procedures outlined in the proposed Student Judicial Charter. On Wednesday, University Council voted by a wide margin to remand the Charter to the Student Judicial Reform Committee for revisions. Council wants the Committee to focus on protecting respondents' rights. According to College senior and Undergraduate Assembly member Dan Schorr, who also chairs the First Amendment Task Force, the proposed Charter does not provide sufficient protection for student defendants. "Our premise is this -- all rights, including free speech rights, cannot be secure if the system of justice is a system of injustice," he said. "Therefore, what we want to do is propose an alternative plan for University judicial hearings that protects the rights of student defendants and recognizes that a student being prosecuted is inherently a confrontational situation." Schorr said that because a student's future academic career and membership in the University community may be in jeopardy during judicial proceedings, it is essential that student defendants are permitted to call and cross-examine witnesses. Schorr also said it is essential to allow students' advisers to speak during the hearings. Additionally, the group contends that an open hearing should be granted upon a respondent's request. "I learned in high school that an open judicial system was one of the basic principles of a free society," Schorr said. "Under this system, students can't defend themselves and there's no public scrutiny." But College junior Wilton Levine, who chaired the Student Judicial Charter working group of the SJRC, said the Charter makes "every effort to protect the respondent's rights." "The purpose of the system as we have defined it is not for the complainant to gain retribution," he said. "The purpose of the system is to determine whether the allegations about the respondent are true or not." Levine added that the Charter does permit respondents to address the hearing board, and said he is open to allowing respondents to reply to statements made by witnesses. "[But] cross-examination takes it to another level, [and] makes it a more adversarial system," Levine said. College junior Maxim Jacobs, the First Amendment Task Force's vice chair for external affairs, will be chairing the group's judicial reform committee. Jacobs said he became involved in the reform process because he was concerned about students being "railroaded." "I looked over the [proposed] Judicial Charter outline and it really didn't say that we had any rights," Jacobs said. "It basically said that they could do what they wanted to us depending on who's their chair." Jacobs said he could not estimate how long the group's work will take, but Schorr said he hopes that the First Amendment Task Force can generate a preliminary document "within the next few weeks." Provost Stanley Chodorow said he has not heard of the First Amendment Task Force, but is willing to listen to the group's ideas. "In my view, all good ideas are useful and contribute to the process," he said. "Bad ideas are only a problem if they waste time by becoming the focus of an extended discussion that leads nowhere. "But bad ideas have their role; they help define the good ideas," Chodorow added.

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