This study compared defendants charged with Criminal Sexual Conduct whose victims were <6 years of age with defendants whose victims were 12 or more years of age. The study included 163 men referred to the evaluation unit of a state center for forensic psychiatry. Thirty-eight men had younger victims (YVs) and 125 men had older victims (OVs). The variables of comparison were defendant demograph...

BACKGROUND Begun in the late 1990s, mental health courts are specialty criminal courts developed to address the needs of persons with mental illness. METHODS As many persons with intellectual disabilities (IDs) may overlap in the mental health court system, we used mental health court records to examine the phenomenology and outcomes of 224 defendants with and without co-occurring IDs in the ...

There are no published data on the rates of competency restoration for adjudicated incompetent felony criminal defendants diagnosed with delusional disorder. A retrospective record review was conducted of all incompetent defendants with the principal diagnosis of delusional disorder who had undergone involuntary medication treatment for competency restoration during a 13-year period at a federa...

It is a common misconception that individuals with schizophrenia are significantly more dangerous and violent than individuals free of mental illness. This stigmatization may lead to harsher sentences when people with schizophrenia are involved in criminal activities and sentenced by a jury. This study presented four conditions to which participants were randomly assigned, alone or in a group o...

This paper examines the strategic interaction of a defendant and a prosecutor during the plea bargaining process. A four-stage game of incomplete information is developed where the defendant’s guilt or innocence is private information but the amount of resources available to the prosecutor is common knowledge. The basic result of the paper is that equilibrium is semi-separating; the plea o¤er i...

Previous articles have addressed the ethical and legal issues involved when private psychiatrists perform forensic evaluations on criminal defendants before the defendants have access to counsel; but there have been few studies addressing evaluations requested through public facilities and by clinicians other than psychiatrists. The authors present the results of a detailed study of defendants ...

OBJECTIVE The authors studied all defendants in Baltimore City's circuit and district courts who pleaded not criminally responsible, Maryland's version of the not guilty by reason of insanity plea, during a 1-year period. The study was designed to compare the perception that the insanity plea is misused to actual outcome data. METHOD The cohort of defendants who pleaded not criminally respons...

Following the 1994 Rwandan genocide, many defendants on trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) testified on their own behalf. This article analyzes transcripts of their testimonies to learn (1) how defendants discuss the grave crimes of which they are accused, and (2) how their explanatory styles allow them to rationalize their actions and negotiate their tarnished ident...

U.S. courts frequently require forensic examiners to offer opinions concerning the likelihood that criminal defendants found incompetent to stand trial can have their competence "restored" through treatment. Yet no jurisdiction has established legal guidelines for testimony concerning restorability, and several authors have suggested that mental health professionals cannot accurately predict wh...

The present study is a meta-analysis of competency to stand trial research. One meta-analysis was previously conducted in this area, but the large number of empirical studies that have been conducted since and the introduction of new instruments and revision of old instruments warranted updating and expanding upon the previously conducted study via contemporary meta-analytic methods. We metaana...