Forensic Psychology For Dummies (101 page)
Read Forensic Psychology For Dummies Online
Authors: David Canter
Medical records
The aim is to determine whether a consistent pattern of actions and reports about the defendant exists that’s in accord with his own account of his experiences.
Examining Issues of Competency
As well as having to testify in connection to a person’s plea of ‘not guilty by reason of insanity’ or ‘diminished responsibility’ as I discuss in the preceding section, a far more common form of assessment that may be made, is whether the person has the mental and emotional ability to stand trial. This idea of the
competence
of the defendant is based on the ethical requirement that no person should be subjected to a trial if he doesn’t at the time:
Tricking the trickster
When Kenneth Bianchi was charged with a series of rapes and murders across Los Angeles in 1977 and 1978, which led to him being called ‘The Hillside Strangler’,
he offered as part of his defence that he should be regarded as insane because he had multiple personality disorder, saying that his other identity ‘Steve Walker’ had done the killing.Two experts originally believed him, but the police were suspicious because Steve Walker was the name of the student that Bianchi had used to fraudulently obtain a college certificate so that he could practise psychology; also, in interviews, he kept on referring to Steve as ‘he’ rather than ‘I’. The police called in Marin Orne who’d done many studies of how people behave when pretending to be hypnotised. Orne set about hypnotising Bianchi and decided that he was faking it. To test this suspicion further, Orne purposely mislead Bianchi into thinking that people with multiple personalities usually have more than one extra personality. Bianchi unwittingly fell for Orne’s trick, soon generating a new personality, Bill, and a couple of others.
This competency requirement applies throughout the legal process even before the person is charged, and can occur during police searches, eyewitness line-ups, police interviews and so on, and also after the trial for parole hearings and during appeals. Of particular importance is the situation in which the person pleads guilty (which happens, perhaps surprisingly, in the great majority of cases). The court must be confident that the person does understand the implications of such a plea. The same is true if the person decides to waive constitutional rights, such as the right to trial by jury. The person who does this must know what he’s doing, have the intellectual capacity to understand what it means and be clear that he has made that decision.
The assessment of competency can therefore relate to many aspects of the legal process. A forensic psychologist may explore a person’s mental state at the time of the crime while deciding his competence to stand trial, but many professionals frown on this combination of assessments because of the room for confusing rather different issues.
A number of standardised procedures (which I explain in Chapter 9) are used to assess competence, although many practitioners still rely on carefully organised interviews. The assessment instruments include standard measures of intellectual ability, notably intelligence tests, as well as broader assessments of personality that may indicate some form of mental disorder. They may also include direct tests for malingering as I mention in the preceding section or lying as I discuss in Chapter 5.
More specific tests have been devised that explore a person’s understanding of what goes on in court. They include their ability to make sense of the legal process and how a verdict is reached; their capacity to distinguish what’s relevant from what’s not and their understanding of the implications of pleading guilty or not guilty. Crucially important, also, is their ability to makes sense of their own legal predicament. These tests of competency, for example, ask the person what the jury actually does. Another version gives defendants a brief fictional vignette of a case and asks them to answer questions about what happens and why.
About one out of every five people referred for a competency evaluation is eventually found to be not competent enough to undertake the legal process. These people tend to be those who: