Skeem J L, Golding S L, Cohn N B, Berge G
Department of Psychology, University of Utah, Salt Lake City 84112-0251, USA.
Law Hum Behav. 1998 Oct;22(5):519-47. doi: 10.1023/a:1025787429972.
Because the trier of fact determines the weight to be assigned to an examiner's opinion by assessing the strength and persuasiveness of his or her analysis of the data, it is essential that forensic reports communicate the examiner's reasoning process. This study analyzes community examiners' reports on competence to stand trial (CST), emphasizing the nature of examiners' (1) expressed conceptualizations of CST and (2) reasoning establishing a nexus between CST impairments and symptoms of psychopathology. Expert raters coded 100 randomly selected CST reports with respect to a variety of issues, including the examiners' description of the defendant's psycholegal deficits, provision of specific reasoning to link these deficits to psychopathology, and agreement with a paired examiner's global and specific opinions about the defendant's impairments. CST reports were found to (1) reflect basic operationalizations of competence that fail to incorporate legally relevant facets such as a defendant's decisional capacities and (2) adequately document clinical findings, but fail to describe the reasoning underlying psycholegal conclusions. Examiners demonstrated moderately high levels of agreement on defendant's global CST, but expressed radically divergent bases for this opinion. These findings are discussed in light of legal, ethical, and professional standards of practice.
由于事实认定者通过评估审查员对数据的分析的力度和说服力来确定赋予审查员意见的权重，因此法医报告传达审查员的推理过程至关重要。本研究分析了社区审查员关于受审能力（CST）的报告，重点关注审查员（1）所表达的CST概念化的性质，以及（2）在CST损伤与精神病理学症状之间建立联系的推理。专家评分员针对各种问题对100份随机挑选的CST报告进行了编码，包括审查员对被告心理法律缺陷的描述、提供将这些缺陷与精神病理学联系起来的具体推理，以及与配对审查员关于被告损伤的总体和具体意见的一致性。研究发现，CST报告（1）反映了能力的基本操作化，未纳入诸如被告的决策能力等与法律相关的方面，（2）充分记录了临床发现，但未描述心理法律结论背后的推理。审查员在被告的总体CST上表现出中等程度的高度一致性，但对该意见表达了截然不同的依据。将根据法律、道德和专业实践标准对这些发现进行讨论。
