G T Bennett | PubMed Health

PubMed1985

Qualifying the psychiatrist as a lay witness: a reaction to the American Psychiatric Association petition in Barefoot v. Estelle.

Organized psychiatry has recently begun to define limits to expert testimony. The American Psychiatric Association filed an amicus brief in the case of Barefoot v. Estelle urging legal curtailment of psychiatric testimony as to future dangerousness and prohibition on Constitutional grounds of expert psychiatric testimony solely based on hypothetical data. The Supreme Court refused relief on both questions. Psychiatric testimony to ultimate questions at law is limited by the inherent contextual variables of psychiatric clinical and experimental knowledge and practice. A forensic science model for psychiatric participation with explicit psychiatrically defined limitations is proposed using competence to stand trial as an example.

Antisocial Personality Disorder↗

PubMed1984

Competence to proceed: a functional and context-determinative decision.

Legally, the defendant's competence at any stage of criminal proceedings is defined in terms of the test set forth in Dusky v. United States, a test establishing minimum rationality as the basis for determining mental competence. A number of investigators have attempted to devise testing instruments to assist clinicians in applying this test to individual defendants being examined for competence. Competence, however, is both context-determinative and functional in nature. The evaluator must insist on being given specific information relating to the functions that the defendant is expected to perform. The evaluator must then assess the defendant's measurable skills in the light of those specified functions and articulate his findings to the court in terms of the skills and functions rather than in terms of conclusory legal labels. Competence is then best determined by the court as a legal, not a mental, health decision under the somewhat nebulous but nonetheless appropriate criterion of "fundamental fairness" in the light of the defendant's mental state.

Expert Testimony↗