Law and Human Behavior

If psychological evaluations of criminal defendants could be performed in the community on an outpatient basis rather than in a distant state hospital on an inpatient basis, substantial savings could result and defendants' rights to speedy trial, bail, and the least restrictive alternative would more likely be respected. The authors thus developed a protocol, the mental state at the time of the offense screening evaluation (MSE), designed to enable outpatient evaluatiors to “screen out,” in the course of a brief interview, those defendants whose alleged criminal conduct clearly was not caused by “significant mental abnormality.” They tested the validity of the MSE by having pairs of mental health professionals use the MSE to evaluate 36 criminal defendants. The professionals' conclusions were then compared with the conclusions of state hospital professionals who performed a comprehensive evaluation of each defendant. They were also compared to court adjudications of the defendant's criminal charges. They found that the MSE screened out a large proportion of defendants (sufficient to suggest an improvement in cost-efficiency) without prejudice to those defendants who might have a valid legal defense.

The concept of desert (the principle that punishment should be made proportional to the severity of the crime committed) is introduced against its philosophical and legal background. Discussion focuses on the role of desert in contemporary sentencing reform proposals and the relationship between desert and other goals of legal punishment. Previous empirical research has addressed a between-offense conception of desert and suggests proportionality does control individuals' responses to crimes differing in severity. Our research focuses on the operation of desert within offenses (or the balance of harm done and punishment deserved for the individual offender) within the context of crimes of increasing severity. Six experimental simulations varied the relativity of victim/offender suffering prior to sentencing. Results show that for a minor crime punishment is an inverse monotonic function of offender suffering, but for crimes of moderate and high severity only excessive offender suffering successfully mitigated punishment. The source of offender suffering made no difference, supporting earlier work by Kalven and Zeisel; suffering exerted no effect on conviction decisions. Overall results are viewed as demonstrating the influence of both within-and between-offense conceptions of desert and the importance of the symbolic and moral blame components of legal punishment.

The prediction of recidivism is of growing importance in the criminal justice system, and authorities have recommended the use of statistical prediction devices along with case-specific information. However, research has shown that laypeople and experts have difficulty dealing with statistical information, and tend to ignore it in the presence of case-specific information. A study was conducted in which subjects were given one of three different types of base-rate information about known recidivism rates in a population, and a sample of several case descriptions, and asked to predict recidivism for the sample cases. No use of base-rate information occurred when case-specific information was available. The implications for decisions and training in the criminal justice system are discussed.

Hai phiên tòa đã được tổ chức bằng cách ghi âm các báo cáo được thực hiện chính xác tại tòa án. Một phiên xử là vụ trộm cắp, và một vụ hiếp dâm, liên quan đến hai bị cáo và thay đổi lượng bằng chứng buộc tội. Các đối tượng được tuyển chọn để lắng nghe các phiên tòa và đưa ra phán quyết sau khi thảo luận. Việc tuyển chọn các đối tượng được thực hiện qua phương pháp khảo sát theo từng nhà nhằm tạo ra một chuỗi bồi thẩm đoàn có cơ cấu đại diện cho dân số trưởng thành của khu vực Vùng Lớn London. Ba mươi bốn bồi thẩm đoàn đã xem xét vụ trộm cắp, và 26 bồi thẩm đoàn đã xem xét vụ hiếp dâm, tương ứng với 319 và 257 đối tượng. Kết quả cho thấy có rất ít biến số tương quan với phán quyết, cả trước và sau phán quyết. Nhìn chung, có một xu hướng nhẹ đối với các bồi thẩm trẻ tuổi (dưới 25) và bồi thẩm lớn tuổi (trên 40) thiên về việc miễn tội. Về thái độ và tính cách, phát hiện chung duy nhất là những người có quan điểm tích cực nhất về hệ thống bồi thẩm có xu hướng muốn kết tội.

Pairs (N = 234) of witnesses and lineup administrators completed an identification task in which administrator knowledge, lineup presentation, instruction bias, and target presence were manipulated. Administrator knowledge had the greatest effect on identifications of the suspect for simultaneous photospreads paired with biased instructions, with single-blind administrations increasing identifications of the suspect. When biased instructions were given, single-blind administrations produced fewer foil identifications than double-blind administrations. Administrators exhibited a greater proportion of biasing behaviors during single-blind administrations than during double-blind administrations. The diagnosticity of identifications of the suspect in double-blind administrations was double their diagnosticity in single-blind administrations. These results suggest that when biasing factors are present to increase a witness’s propensity to guess, single-blind administrator behavior influences witnesses to identify the suspect.

We studied the predictive, comparative, and incremental validity of three measures of psychopathic features (Psychopathy Checklist: Youth Version [PCL:YV]; Antisocial Process Screening Device [APSD]; Childhood Psychopathy Scale [CPS]) vis-à-vis criminal recidivism among 83 delinquent youth within a truly prospective design. Bivariate and multivariate analyses (Cox proportional hazard analyses) showed that of the three measures, the CPS was most consistently related to most types of recidivism in comparison to the other measures. However, incremental validity analyses demonstrated that all of the predictive effects for the measures of psychopathic features disappeared after conceptually relevant covariates (i.e., substance use, conduct disorder, young age, past property crime) were included in multivariate predictive models. Implications for the limits of these measures in applied juvenile justice assessment are discussed.