Honor committee establishes Defense Advocate Pool

Five undergraduates were selected to be members of a Defense Advocate Pool for students accused of violating the Honor Code yesterday afternoon. The students selected were Peter Shindel '02, Meghan Fehlig '02, Jamila Celestine '03, Christian Asmar '04 and Jonathan Rawlings '04.

All students called before the Honor Committee have the right to a Defense Advocate, an undergraduate student who is able to question all witnesses and present a summation of the evidence to the committee at the end of a hearing.

The Defense Advocate Pool will provide Defense Advocates for accused students who are unable to find someone to represent them and will also offer advice to Advocates that students have selected on their own.

David Tannenbaum '01, who served on the Honor Committee his sophomore year, began to consider ways of improving the Defense Advocate system during his junior year and formulated a proposal for the creation of the Defense Advocate Pool last fall.

"I noticed that for a lot of freshmen and sophomores, they would have difficulty finding Defense Advocates who know the Honor Code well and who could do a really good job of representing them in the hearing," he said.

"It was always an added source of stress for someone who was accused of violating the Honor Code. They now had to spend time finding someone to represent them. Forming the Defense Advocate Pool seemed like the way to relieve that problem in a fairly constructive way," he explained.

The Defense Advocate Pool will be a separate organization from the Honor Committee, according to Tannenbaum, in order to prevent the Committee from being implicated in a case where the student in question thought their Defense Advocate did not do a good job. But there will be interaction between Defense Advocates and Honor Committee members in order "to monitor the effectiveness of the Defense Advocate Pool, especially in the first few years, and to see where adjustments could be made," Tannenbaum said.

The Defense Advocate Pool will not only help students accused of violating the Honor Code, but could also contribute to overall efforts to improve the Honor Code system and its perception on campus, according to Russell Eckenrod '01, a member of the Honor Committee and the selection committee for the Defense Advocate Pool.

As the Honor Committee looks toward expansion of the Code next year into activities ouside of the classroom and at ways of tightening up many of its procedures, the Defense Advocate Pool could play an important role in improving the perception of the Honor Code on campus.

"As we expand, we need to improve, and this is one step down that road, especially in improving perception," Eckenrod explained.

"[Defense Advocates] will have an interest, much like Committee members will, in maintaining the integrity of the Code and assisting in improving that system," Eckenrod said.

"Essentially this is bringing in five new experts," he added.

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Tannenbaum also hopes that the Defense Advocate Pool will increase student knowledge of the Honor Code.

"Another big reason why I want to start the Defense Advocate Pool is that right now there are a very small group of people who deal intensely with the Honor Committee and with the Honor Code, and that is just the Honor Committee and people who are accused of violating it," he said. "It seemed like it would be a good idea to make another group of people who are interested in seeing the honor committee serve the campus well."

The selection committee was looking for students well-versed in the Honor Code, or who had the appropriate skills, according to Tannenbaum. These skills include experience in speaking in front of a group of people, the ability to analyze evidence and synthesize it into an understandable form, an appreciation of the gravity of the honor code and its confidentiality and the ability to establish trust with students who are accused.

Jamila Celestine '03 was selected to serve as the Chair of the Defense Advocate Pool. She is pre-law and an attorney for Mock Trial, and Celestine said she has always had an interest in situations that involve defending people.

"I have always wondered how students in question dealt with being accused if they were not familiar with the Honor Code or if they were just nervous. [The Defense Advocate Pool] seemed to me to be a really good idea," she said. "I definitely felt it was a need at Princeton and that it was something I wanted to do."