Abstract
Both the public and the professional community view the participation of mental health professionals in the criminal justice system with some misgiving. A review of earlier studies of psychiatric participation in the assessment of defendants' competency to stand trial reveals a legitimate basis for these misgivings. The present study reports the reliability of opinion formation on the issue of competency to stand trial in 44 cases by clinical psychologists specially trained in the assessment of competency. The perfect reliability achieved in this study and other recent papers reporting similar, favorable results, document the progress mental health professionals have made in developing assessment techniques that reach respectable levels of reliability and validity.
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