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| Views differ on recent
Judicial Affairs bill |
David Forbes
SGA Beat
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For the
senators who wrote the bill, reforming Judicial Affairs at Appalachian
State University was a personal and important issue.
“I have a friend who was found guilty of vandalism to the [George
M.] Holmes [Convocation] Center despite the fact that someone had
already been punished for the same crime. He was made to pay for
something that he did not damage. I was at his hearing; they did
not present in my opinion a compelling case and still found him
guilty,” off-campus senator Ian A. Mance said. “Generally,
throughout the years, I’ve heard students complaining about
getting a raw deal at Judicial Affairs.”
“I wanted to make sure students received a fair hearing when
they were charged with violations of the Student Code of Conduct,
and I didn’t feel like that was the case. I don’t think
there’s adequate due process,” off-campus senator Paul
A. Funderburk said.
Judicial Affairs currently presides over hearings on whether or
not a student has violated the Student Code of Conduct. Punishments
can range from fines to suspension or expulsion.
Mance and Funderburk, along with off-campus senator H. Dustin Bayard,
wrote a bill that would raise the standard of evidence required,
allow an advocate to speak on behalf of a student at a hearing and
require that the judicial board overseeing a student’s case
be unanimous in their decision.
Last Tuesday, the Student Government Association voted overwhelmingly
to endorse the changes.
However, members of Judicial Affairs contend that the hearings are
meant to serve an educational purpose, and these reforms would make
them more adversarial.
“All of these changes would make the process a more legal process.
In fact, this is meant to be a very different process, an educational
process,” Assistant Director of Student Judicial Affairs Karla
P. Rusch said. “I don’t believe it would be beneficial
to the educational process to bring it closer to a criminal process.
It would in fact increase the adversarial nature of the proceeding,
which at this point is an informal proceeding and not adversarial.”
“There’s already an adversarial nature; you’re just
not allowed to have someone defend you,” Funderburk said. “They’re
already using legal terms like a courtroom; they’re just not
providing adequate protection.”
“The types of due process in a criminal court relate to the
loss of life and liberty, which is not what we’re looking at
here. Oftentimes it is appropriate for a student to have time away
from the university to deal with issues they have to deal with,
and many students do come back after a period of suspension, so
it’s very different from the kind of punishments one could
receive in a criminal process,” Rusch said.
Rusch said she also had misgivings about a student advocate being
allowed to address the board.
“At this point the process doesn’t involve any kind of
oral argument. The university doesn’t present an oral argument,
nor does the student. The student can speak on their own behalf,
but there aren’t arguments flying back and forth,” Rusch
said.
“Here, we don’t really have a problem with the people
in Judicial Affairs; we think they want to do the right thing. We
have a problem with the process in the code,” Mance said. “I
don’t think this will be a matter of guilty people getting
off, so much as it would innocent students being protected.”
“Part of the mission of the code is to create a positive environment.
To do that, we balance a lot of needs—the need to educate the
student who’s involved, the need to protect the community.
A criminal court process does not address all of those,” Rusch
said. |
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