How adequate are Oklahoma's mental health evaluations for determining competency in criminal proceedings? the bench and the bar respond

Abstract

The perceptions of frontline legal professionals constitute an important but often neglected source of information about the construct of criminal competence and the referral and evaluation process. To address this deficit, we surveyed attorneys and judges who were practicing in the two largest cities in Oklahoma. Respondents (n = 110) estimated that competency was a legitimate issue in about 5% of criminal cases and that they referred only two-thirds of those cases for formal evaluation. Psychiatrists were the first choice of most attorneys to conduct the evaluations, even though psychiatric evaluations were not perceived as being more valid than evaluations conducted by doctoral level psychologists. Respondents strongly favored the outpatient mode of evaluation and judged outpatient reports to be of better quality than inpatient reports. Finally, in response to both structured and open-ended questions, attorneys expressed concern about inadequacies in descriptions of the factual bases for examiners' opinions and requested more specific information concerning defendants' functional abilities.