[Opinions on cases referring to: estimation of ability to participate in legal proceedings, estimation of ability to stay in conditions of imprisonment in the material of the Forensic Medicine Department, Silesian School of Medicine in Katowice in the years 1997-2002].

The legal and medical opinions referring to conditions of health of the participants of penal procedures: their ability to take part in legal proceedings, their ability to stay in conditions of imprisonment, are more and more common as an advisory practice of the Forensic Medicine Department in Katowice. It concerns the people connected with so called delinquency organized and people involved with economic crime. In the available literature there are no instructions relating to the description of the health state, which would be a contraindication (temporary or permanent) for partaking in legal proceedings or staying in conditions of imprisonment. In practice we observe a full freedom in dispensing of the medical documents and medico-legal opinions. The assumptions dating from 1997-2002, issued by the Department, were analyzed making allowances for age, sex, the kind of somatic diseases and the commissioning organs. Referring to obligatory regulations of the law, the authors introduce advisory principles accepted by the Forensic Medicine Department in Katowice in the above mentioned cases and attempt to estimate the divergence between judicial medicine experts with clinical specialties and forensic medicine experts.