Jury Duty

"A cadet will not lie, cheat, steal nor tolerate those who do."
-USMA Cadet Honor Code

The honor code is a very serious thing at the academy. A good illustration of this is the movie Codebreakers which is based on a true story in which the majority of the Army football team was caught violating said code and kicked out.

Last week, I was "randomly selected" to be on an honor board. The whole thing could have easily been cleared up if the teacher reporting the violation would have simply taken 2 minutes of her time to talk to her students and actually figure out what was going on. Instead 9 cadets on the board, the board president (also a cadet), the respondant (defendant in normal court), his cadet advisor, and a handful of cadet witnesses had to miss a day of school to go and try to sort out what happened. Not to mention the JAG attorney and court reporter who had to be present. That's a lot of wasted man hours and it doesn't even figure all the investigative time involved before the case even came to court! 0830-1630-8 hours each. In high school the opportunity to get out of class would have been welcomed but here? seriously? you want me to miss my classes? 2 minutes of her time, that's all it would have taken to clear this up. But I'm not bitter...ha!

Anyways, the teacher (a civilian who lost her contract to teach at the academy at the end of the semester...I wonder why?) assigned a project which was and administrative nightmare. The class was to design a week long workout with the purpose of moving toward an individual goal they had set earlier in the class. Upon completing the workout, the teacher collected them and passed them back randomly for someone else to actually do the workouts and assess how well designed the program was. In order to assure an unbiased assessment, the programs were submitted anonymously- no names! The teacher used absolutely no system to track which paper belonged to which student. Needless to say, more than a month later when the students were getting their papers back there was some confusion. The student in question claimed to have assessed a paper, and the teacher didn't believe him and reported him for an honor violation stating that the student was absent the day the papers were turned in (false) and that the handwriting on the paper didn't match that of the student (which it obviously did when we made him write the exact same comments in the court room- stylistically and misspellings). Both statements were entirely false. Upon questioning her, she stated that another student had actually done the work so we pulled him out of class and questioned him. When we showed him a photocopy of the paper his response was "This definitely isn't mine. The handwriting isn't mine, the workout isn't mine, I've never even seen this before." Hmm, I certainly trust this teacher after that.

The hardest part was figuring out exactly what the teacher was claiming. Deliberation took all of 10 minutes, more than half of which was spent talking about how inept the teacher was rather than whether the kid was guilty or not-he was obviously innocent).

Jury duty is a pain in the butt. Thankfully we finished in one day but that day was still shot. Thanks unnamed instructor for wasting my time- cadets just have so much of it in the middle of the week ya know?