Forensic Science International Mind and Law最新文献

Background

Very few studies have investigated the effect of the process of litigation on the mental health of litigants. In Ghana, not much is known about the stress that litigants encounter and how they cope during the process of litigation.

Methods

This study used a mixed-method sequential explanatory design to explore the stressors people litigating as individuals encounter in Ghana and how they cope in the process of litigation. As the second phase following the quantitative stage, interviews were conducted with seventeen (male = 13, female = 4) litigants (defendants = 4, plaintiffs = 13) who were selected (using criterion sampling) from the Law Court Complex in Accra, Ghana. Their average age and the average duration of the case was 50.13 (SD = 12.55), and 26.7 months respectively.

Results and discussion

To explain the results found in the quantitative phase, three themes with subthemes were extracted from the data set: challenges in the court process, emotional consequences of the litigation process, and coping mechanisms. The frequent adjournments of cases, delays on court days, deliberate dragging of cases, financial strain, and opportunity cost, were the challenges encountered by litigants in the court process. These led to emotional outcomes such as stress, overstraining, sleepless nights, numbness, and the acceptance of court proceedings as part of life. To help them cope with these emotional outcomes, litigants looked for a light at the end of the tunnel and reliance on their faith. The stressful nature of the court process and how litigants cope with the process of litigation is discussed. Consequently, we recommend that people be educated about Bar etiquette and court procedures. Additionally, we suggest that lawyers should provide some form of scientifically-derived estimation of how long a case might last. It is also recommended that law firms consider providing counselling sessions for their clients.

At the beginning of this year, the UK government released a White Paper on Reforms of the 1983 Mental Health Act (MHA) aiming to achieve higher quality, accessible mental health care, as well as empowering people detained under MHA during the process and continuation of detention. In this piece, we focus on the potential impact of the proposal around appropriate care, management and detention of people with Personality Disorder (PD) within the criminal justice system (CJS), psychiatric service provision and community routes. We briefly review the historical context of reforms of PD services in the UK and discuss the proposed changes and issues in relation to the criteria of least restriction, detention and therapeutic benefit. We highlight the complexity around referral routes and logistics barriers for secure PD services that might hamper speeded referral routes and raise concerns around responsibility for authorisation of transfers in the context of risk of serious harm to the public. We emphasise the complex treatment needs of individuals with PDs and how these are potentially not met. We also discuss the shift of focus from reactive care to preventative measures and early intervention in the community for individuals with mild-to-moderate levels of PD. We highlight the need for appropriate integrative services in the community to facilitate assessment across services, identification of complex needs and support options including earlier routine screening and potential digital interventions to optimise specialised care for PD.

While the popular belief that Francisco de Goya (1746–1828) turned suddenly to dark, irrational subjects after his illness of 1793 is arguably mistaken, what is true is that after the illness he devoted himself more closely to black- and- white media. Like Rembrandt (1606–1669), whom Goya particularly admired, the Spanish painter is one of the greatest graphic designers in the history of art. It is also part of Goya's originality that in an era when engravers were often regarded as mere copyists and not creative designers, and drawing was not seen as a complete art form, he produced large numbers of original engravings and many finished drawings in chalk, ink and wash, dating from the 1790s to his old age, and preserved them carefully in albums. Mental illness became a recurring subject in a number of these drawings, as the Spanish artist represented numerous depictions of people suffering from a mental disorder and foregrounded the notion of irrationality in his graphic art. This manuscript discusses these themes in relation to Goya's pieces, focusing on elements of his biography and contemporaneous ideas from the Enlightenment period as influences for this aspect of his work.

Complex negotiations are done by people and are often carried out in pursuit of culturally ingrained ideas such as international unity or national sovereignty. As such, they may be subject to the sorts of adaptive biases and reasoning heuristics that are present at the level of individual or collective decision making. The following commentary applies an influential model of intuitive ethics, The Moral Foundations Theory, to the Brexit negotiations. This framework suggests that moral intuitions reflect five adaptive psychological systems shaped by our evolutionary history. Focusing on the three most relevant foundations of Fairness/cheating, Loyalty/betrayal, Authority/subversion, I explore how both parties’ red lines and priorities are consistent with this criterion. In doing so, I hope to provide insight into how innate cognitive biases can inform legal processes with wide-ranging ramifications.

The current study examines the relationship between parental and intimate adult (best friend and partner) attachments with dark personality traits and empathy deficits in women. Participants (N = 262 females, M age = 26.65) completed self-report measures of the Dark Triad (DT) traits, cognitive and affective empathy, and attachment experiences in close relationships. Path model analysis showed that parental avoidant attachment predicted the dark dyad traits (Machiavellianism, psychopathy) while only parental anxious attachment predicted psychopathy. Psychopathy was the only dark trait directly and indirectly (via affective empathy) associated with intimate adult life attachment insecurity, whereas narcissism was associated with secure attachment through reduced anxious attachment towards best friends. Reduced affective empathy mediated the relationship between psychopathy and increased avoidant attachment, and also directly predicted lower anxious (best friend and partner) attachment. These findings are considered in the context of a possible route from parental to intimate adult life attachment difficulties in women with dark – in particular, psychopathic traits.

Literature pertaining to individuals with sexual convictions typically reports punitive views about their crimes, sentences, and overall effectiveness of rehabilitation, with such perceptions partially driven by offence demographics such as victim age and perpetrator sex. This manuscript extends this literature through the exploration of perceiver characteristics of self-reported traditionalism and education in forensic psychology as mechanisms of perceptions and awareness. Participants (N = 101; 60% forensic psychology students; 40% general public) read online vignettes related to sexual offences (manipulating perpetrator sex and victim age), and completed measures of perceptions of sex offenders, perceived rehabilitation efficacy and traditionalism. Members of the general population (without a background of education in forensic psychology) reported harsher views towards individuals with sexual convictions and their rehabilitation, relative to students of forensic psychology, independent of their greater traditionalism. There was no main effect of or interaction with perpetrator sex. Whilst participants endorsed more negative perceptions towards sex offenders of child than adult victims, this did not extent to differences in perceptions regarding their rehabilitation. Findings reported here indicate a need for greater understanding as to the factors that might moderate perceptions towards individuals with sexual convictions and have implications for the promotion of sex offender rehabilitation programmes. Understanding the root of such public attitudes is a key step for creating and improving associated policies.

Neuroscience has the benefit of illuminating the neural correlates of behaviors that are of interest to the legal system. This raises the optimism that neuroscience will be able to considerably and appropriately address some perennial problems besetting the legal system. Notable among them are the determination of: (1) criminal responsibility; (2) mental states at the time of offense; (3) competence to stand trial (also known as fitness to plead or adjudicative competence); and (4) whether a defendant is telling the truth. Whereas previous discussions have focused mainly on criminal responsibility, the present review is limited to the assessment of mental states at the time of offense as a legal pre-requisite for determining criminal responsibility in trials involving defendants claiming mental incapacitation (insanity defense). This is one of the challenging forensic assessment endeavors, attracting public criticisms following acquittals based on the insanity defense. We canvas the relevant neuroscientific evidence to elucidate how neuroscientific advances can be applied to help improve upon the assessment of mental states at the time of offense examinations. We examine neuroscience assessments of intention, knowledge of the nature and quality of an act, knowledge of wrongness of an act, as well as decision-making. We conclude that neuroscience assessments would be useful as a complementary data source in insanity evaluations. Clinical opinion based on neuroscientific findings as well as psychosocial data (biopsychosocial assessment) would help to improve upon assessment results.