Psychiatric Court Reports–Too Many or Too Few?

Abstract

This paper describes a project to examine the consistency of criteria that magistrates use to refer defendants for a psychiatric report. Observations were made in a Magistrates' Court by the two authors, independently, on cases which were treated summarily that day. In this way 100 cases were studied.

The observers used the criteria which had been described in previous literature as being used by magistrates to refer cases. It was found that there was no consistent use of criteria and the referrals often appeared to be idiosyncratic—some of the reasons for this are discussed.