The criminal defendant with identified mental disorder.

Personal characteristics of criminal defendants including sex,1 age and education,2 and race have been shown to relate to outcome of the defendant's contact with the criminal justice system. Whether mental disorder relates to outcome is uncertain, although there is anecdotal evidence to suggest that in some cases judges may be influenced by a history of mental disorder to acquit the gUilty. 4 We investigated whether identification of a defendant as having a mental disorder predicts outcome of the criminal justice process. Specifically, we ask whether defendants with identified mental disorder are more or less likely than other defendants to be found guilty, and if found guilty, more or less likely to be supervised. Studies of the relationship between the criminal justice and the mental health systems have included research into police behavior toward the mentally ill,5 arrest rate of mental patients,0-9 and rate of mental disorders in prison populations. 'O13 We found only one study of mental patients in court that concluded the mentally ill in California were being inappropriately crirninalized. '4 We found two studies in which psychological characteristics of defendants were considered along with other variables in determining the outcome of contact with the criminal justice system. IS.16 Maslach and Garber 's studied parole hearings and found that psychological assessments were the most important variable in determining who was paroled and who was not. In a study of sentencing, Konecni and Ebbesen '6 found that type of crime, offender's prior record, bail, and probation officer's recommendation related to sentencing; medical, psychological, and psychiatric information did not.