Mental disorder as the cause of a crime

An offender's punishment can be reduced when a court decides that his mental disorder reduces his responsibility for what he did. Courts have sought to establish whether a mentally disordered offender's responsibility is reduced by asking whether his disorder caused the crime. Acceptance of this “causation by mental disorder” criterion has fluctuated, however. This may be because causal explanations are not the types of explanations we are accustomed to offering for the kinds of acts that bring defendants, and psychiatric witnesses, to court. More often, we offer what philosophers have called “possibility” explanations for these acts. The application of psychiatry to possibility explanations has not been widely explored. It offers the potential for the improved use of psychiatric evidence in criminal proceedings.     

Biological factors and crime: implications for forensic psychiatry

To summarize, we can say that (1) Criminal behavior, especially chronic criminal behavior, seems to be partly genetically predisposed; (2) An important task at this point is to attempt to determine the biological factors which predispose people to crime; and (3) We have related some tentative initial steps being taken in the study of the autonomic nervous system as one possible heritable, biological basis for the failure of normal social learning forces in inhibiting criminal behavior. Early in this paper we discussed the tenability of asserting criminal responsibility on individuals whose criminal behavior has a partly genetic etiology. But this special consideration seems to set biological factors apart as being in some unique causal category. In fact, genetic, physiological, and biochemical factors are causal agents in the same sense as family, social class, or neighborhood factors. Of course, criminal behavior (like all other behavior) must be caused; one class of causal variables is the biological category. The legal doctrine of responsibility is not challenged by identifying biological factors as partially determining crime any more than it is by findings of social causation. Only in cases in which abnormal biological factors are exceptionally powerful influences might responsibility be challenged. Such cases will be quite rare.     

Controversial ethical issues in forensic psychiatry: a survey

A survey was conducted of members of the Psychiatry and Behavioral Science section of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences (AAFS) to determine their ethical concerns about controversial items. Issues were included in the survey from the American Psychiatric Association (APA) and AAFS Code of Ethics. Strong support was found for those issues. Some AAPL items from a previous version of their guidelines did not receive support. Fortunately, they have been modified in a later AAPL draft, after AAPL received this survey's results. Clarification was obtained on some ambiguous items from a previous AAFS survey. The present survey showed strong support for addressing in forensic psychiatry's ethical guidelines some issues previously considered too controversial.     

法医现场勘查学初析

法医现场勘查是公安法医检案的一个组成部分,与痕迹现场勘查各有侧重。本文通过室内、野外、运动空间三类现场初步分析了法医现场勘查的要点。     

The concept of free will and forensic psychiatry

This text examines how conceptions of free will impact on legal systems and forensic psychiatry: free will is generally regarded as a prerequisite for responsibility, criminal responsibility included, while forensic psychiatry to a large extent deals with the limits imposed on responsibility by mental disorder. First we discuss the question of whether there is and has been such an impact. The answer is yes: different conceptions of free will have inspired different systems of law and forensic psychiatry, as becomes clear when looking at the accountability doctrine as compared to the unique Swedish system rejecting this doctrine. However, there is no necessary connection between doctrines of responsibility and conceptions of free will, since the former primarily says something about when someone should be held responsible and the latter says something about when someone really is free in a sense relevant to responsibility. This leads to the second question: should conceptions of free will have an impact on law and forensic psychiatry? We argue: that they should not, given the implausibility the normative theory retributivism, which posits a direct connection between free will and punishment. More importantly, questions of free will are complicated and unresolved philosophical issues that are better left out of the everyday decision-making incumbent on the legal and psychiatric systems. Instead, we recommend using an empirically useful and gradual conception of autonomy to facilitate the determination of legal responsibility. This autonomy conception, being neutral on the question of free will, eliminates the need to take a stand on it.     

The role of forensic geoscience in wildlife crime detection

The increase in both automation and precision in the analysis of geological materials has had significant impact upon forensic investigations in the last 10 years. There is however, a fundamental philosophical difference between forensic and geological enquiry. This paper presents the results of forensic geoscientific investigations of three cases of wildlife crime. Two cases involve the analysis of soils recovered after incidents of illegal badger baiting in the United Kingdom. The third case involves the illegal importation of Eleonora's Falcon (Falco eleonorae) into the United Kingdom from the Mediterranean. All three cases utilise the analysis of soils by a variety of physical, chemical and biological techniques. These involve mineral and grain size analyses, cation and anion compositions, pH, organic content and pollen analysis. The independent analysis undertaken by specialists in each of these three main fields conclude firstly, that there is a significant similarity between sediments taken at the crime site at both badger setts and with sediments recovered from various spades, shovels and clothing belonging to suspects and secondly, that the soils analysed associated with the removal of the falcon eggs in the Mediterranean contained characteristics similar in many respects to the soils of the breeding areas of F. eleonorae on the cliffs of Mallorca. The use of these independent techniques in wildlife crime detection has great potential given the ubiquitous nature of soils and sediments found in association with wildlife sites.     

The place of a forensic archaeologist at a crime scene involving a buried body

This paper examines the place that forensic archaeologists should hold at scenes of crime where a body has been buried. The forensic archaeologist is rapidly becoming a key player whose specialty should be explained, and role defined. A high level of interaction between the forensic archaeologist and other personnel implies good communications skills as well as a precarious mix of receiving orders, assistance and advice as well as giving directions to other staff. The extent to which each of these should be applied will be discussed as well as underlying the absolute need for forensic archaeologist to attend these types of scenes.     

Who's afraid of forensic psychiatry?

Forensic psychiatry has come under mounting criticism from the press and other medical professionals, largely for its participation in the insanity defense. The author argues that the expertise available from the specialty is of increasing importance to psychiatry as a whole, as more and more legal issues become relevant to the practice of general psychiatry, and should be actively encouraged and legitimized rather than ostracized. All psychiatrists should be exposed to forensic principles and practices during their training, and the ability of forensic psychiatrists to serve as transducers between the clinical and the legal/judicial should be increasingly used to present the clinical viewpoint effectively in courts and legislatures.     

Russian and Soviet forensic psychiatry: Troubled and troubling

Russian forensic psychiatry is defined by its troubled and troubling relationship to an unstable state, a state that was not a continuous entity during the modern era. From the mid-nineteenth century, Russia as a nation-state struggled to reform, collapsed, re-constituted itself in a bloody civil war, metastasized into a violent “totalitarian” regime, reformed and stagnated under “mature socialism” and then embraced capitalism and “managed democracy” at the end of the twentieth century. These upheavals had indelible effects on policing and the administration of justice, and on psychiatry's relationship with them. In Russia, physicians specializing in medicine of the mind had to cope with rapid and radical changes of legal and institutional forms, and sometimes, of the state itself. Despite this challenging environment, psychiatrists showed themselves to be active professionals seeking to guide the transformations that inevitably touched their work. In the second half of the nineteenth century debates about the role of psychiatry in criminal justice took place against a backdrop of increasingly alarming terrorist activity, and call for revolution. While German influence, with its preference for hereditarianism, was strong, Russian psychiatry was inclined toward social and environmental explanations of crime. When revolution came in 1917, the new communist regime quickly institutionalized forensic psychiatry. In the aftermath of revolution, the institutionalization of forensic psychiatry “advanced” with each turn of the state's transformation, with profound consequences for practitioners' independence and ethical probity. The abuses of Soviet psychiatry under Stalin and more intensively after his death in the 1960s–80s remain under-researched and key archives are still classified. The return to democracy since the late 1980s has seen mixed results for fresh attempts to reform both the justice system and forensic psychiatric practice.     

Violence prevention in psychiatry: an umbrella review of interventions in general and forensic psychiatry

Relative risks of violence in psychiatric patients are high compared to the general population and existing evidence in non-psychiatric populations may not translate to reductions in violence in psychiatric populations. We searched 10 databases including Medline, EMBASE, CINAHL and Scopus, from inception until August 2015 for systematic reviews and meta-analyses of violence prevention interventions in psychiatry. Reviews were included if they used a hard outcome measure (i.e. police or hospital recorded violence, or reincarceration) and contained randomized or non-randomized controlled studies. Five reviews met our inclusion criteria (n = 8876 patients in total), of which four received a GRADE rating of ‘low’ or ‘very low’. Three randomized studies (n = 636) reported that therapeutic community interventions may reduce reincarceration in drug-using offenders with co-occurring mental illness (‘moderate’ GRADE rating). The lack of intervention research in violence prevention in general and forensic psychiatry suggests that interventions from non-psychiatric populations may need to be relied upon.