Psychology in the Courts

Raymond R. Corrado, Rebecca Dempster, Ronald Roesch, Raymond R. Corrado, Rebecca Dempster, Ronald Roesch

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415654005
• eBook ISBN: 9781134697410
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Law Theory & Practice
• Index: Law

This book provides a useful overview of the latest research into the interaction between psychology and the courts. Leading scholars and practitioners review recent research and practice in a number of principal areas: * adolescents in the legal system * the role of juries * competency to stand trial * conditional release * eyewitness evidence and testimony * the role of the victims.

PART 1

ADOLESCENTS

Chapter 1

TOWARD AN EXPANDED DEFINITION OF ADOLESCENT COMPETENCE IN LEGAL CONTEXTS

Jennifer L. Woolard, Carrie S. Fried and N. Dickon Reppucci

During the past decade, juvenile justice reform in the United States has been based on punishment and endorsed by the public as a means of protection from violent offenders. These reforms have included a lowering of the age at which juveniles can be transferred to the adult system—virtually every state has lowered its age to 14, but several have lowered it even further. For instance, the minimum age is 13 in North Carolina, 10 in Missouri, and 8 in Vermont and Wisconsin. Other states, such as Massachusetts, have made it possible to extend the length of sentencing well past the usual juvenile court jurisdiction age of 21 years. Still others have set the age of original jurisdiction for the adult system below the usual 18. For instance, the age in New York is 16, while North Carolina is at 17. Moreover, the process of judicial and legislative waivers have been supplemented in several states by an expansion of the possible crimes that can be invoked under legislative waiver and the addition of prosecutorial waiver. While this has led to an increased number of violent youth being transferred to adult court, the majority of youth transferred are accused of drug and property crimes (Snyder & Sickmund, 1996). If public safety is the goal, then these reforms are not working. Bishop, Frazier, Lanza-Kaduce, and Winner (1996) have reported that for Florida juveniles transferred to adult court, recidivism rates are worse for transfers than for comparable non-transfers in both short and long term follow-up studies. Moreover, given the fact that transfer to criminal court opens the door to the death penalty (Feld, 1999), the question, “Do children's crimes make them adults?”, has taken on a new urgency for developmental/community psychologists to become involved in the juvenile justice arena.

This central psychological question requires an examination of developmental differences that may exist between children and adults. To approach this, we need to examine the related question, “What is the essential component of adulthood?”. It is our contention that most of us would eventually agree that the concepts of maturity and judgment play a central role in any operational definition of adulthood, and that competence in decision making would be considered a critical element. Under the criminal law in most states, a competent adult is a person 18 or older who is a rational actor, autonomously choosing “to do the illegal act” on the basis of personal preferences and values (Bonnie, Coughlin, Jeffries, & Low, 1997). As a result, adults are responsible and accountable for their actions. Although it could be easily argued that there are many incompetent adults, our society has decided that individual autonomy is a critical element to our way of life and, therefore, the law cannot impinge on that autonomy except in cases of severe mental illness or mental retardation. However, for youth, the concept of immaturity and lack of judgment has often been the basis for not granting them equal rights with adults. Several Supreme Court decisions address this issue: Parham v. J. R. (1979), “Most children, even in adolescence, simply are not able to make sound judgments (p. 603)”; Bellotti v. Baird (1979), “minors often lack the experience, perspective, and judgment to recognize and avoid choices that could be detrimental to them (p. 635)”; and Thompson v. Oklahoma (1988), Adolescents under 16 “are less mature and responsible than adults (p. 834).”

Although one might expect clarity of definition regarding both theory and practice, psychologists have seldom studied the concept of maturity using matched adult and youth samples on any issue. The sparse existing research has usually defined maturity in terms of adolescents’ ability to make decisions about their own actions and has focused on cognitive capacity, specifically the ability to reason, understand, and appreciate decisions as adults would. Researchers have used the legal standard of informed consent in medical decision making situations. Few differences have been found between adults and youth 15 years of age and older. Unfortunately, most investigations suffer from various methodological limitations, including small, unrepresentative, usually white, middle class samples of youth taking part in a simulated laboratory exercise (Scott, Reppucci, & Woolard, 1995). The major exceptions are Grisso's (1981) investigation of Miranda waivers that used delinquent adolescent and criminal adult samples, and Ambuel and Rappaport's (1992) study of abortion decision making by young women who have gone to a clinic to determine whether they are pregnant.

Only Grisso's (1981) research focused on legal decision making. His major finding was that adolescents 15 years and older of average intelligence were able to understand their Miranda rights as well as adults. However, he stressed that understanding these rights did not necessarily mean that adolescents were as capable as adults of asserting those rights. More recently, on a related topic, Peterson-Badali and Abramovitch (1993) found that younger adolescents think less strategically than older adolescents and adults about plea agreements.

A few years ago, Scott et al. (1995) proposed a judgment framework of adolescent competence and maturity that includes the standard cognitive factors of understanding, reasoning, and appreciation, but also several psychosocial factors that would be irrelevant or excluded under an informed consent legal framework. These factors, attitude toward and perception of risk, conformity and compliance in relation to peers and parents, and temporal perspective, are hypothesized to influence adolescent decision making and allow a comparison between subjective values that drive the choices of adolescents and adults. Steinberg and Cauffman (1996) expand this theory by reviewing the adolescent literature under the categories of responsibility, temperance, and perspective and concluded that “one could justify a distinction between individuals 16 and younger and those 17 and older (p. 268).” Even more recently, Lexcen and Reppucci (1998) summarize evidence that the adolescent brain has not reached biological maturity.

Each of these factors, influence of peers and/or parents, risk perception, and temporal perspective, has been linked to behavior and decision making, and each has been shown to change over the course of development (Scott et al., 1995; Steinberg & Cauffman, 1996; Redding, 1997). Moreover, each appears to be related to concepts of maturity and judgment. In addition, within the population of adolescents, factors such as socioeconomic status, race/ethnicity, and IQ may affect a variety of decision-making components, such as the meaning of risk and risky behavior, the number of opportunities to make decisions, the level of risk exposure, access to information, and degree of responsibility for decision-making consequences. How these factors combine with age and with the impact of social and cultural contexts to shape adolescent experience is unclear (Wilkinson & Fagan, 1996). For psychological researchers, a critical task is to analyze the components of decision making that are relevant in different legal contexts to provide policy-makers with a more precise empirically-based understanding of the ways in which decision making of adolescents compares with that of adults. One way of doing this is to investigate the three developmental factors that Scott et al. (1995) delineate as being possible candidates for inclusion in an expanded definition of adolescent competence.

At least two types of competence, adjudicative and culpability, are significant in this current era of punishment reforms in which transferred youth are subject to adult penalties, and, even if retained in juvenile court, may receive longer sentences than previously. Adjudicative competence, or competence to stand trial, refers to a defendant having a degree of understanding to enable the defendant to consult with his or her lawyer, and both a factual and rational under-standing of the proceedings against him (Dusky v. U.S., 1960). In addition, the defendant must have the capacity to assist in preparing his or her defense (Drope v. Missouri, 1975). If an individual is found incompetent under either of these standards, the trial cannot continue. The only empirical studies (Cowden & McKee, 1995; Savitsky & Karras, 1984) to examine these standards used assessments of cognitive abilities developed for adults and ignored developmental psychosocial variables entirely.

Culpability refers to the degree to which individuals can be held accountable for their actions, and thus to what extent retributive punishment is appropriate. It also focuses on whether developmental immaturity should be a mitigating circumstance regarding any crime that occurs. Several scholars have argued that the developmental evidence supports a presumption of diminished responsibility for adolescent offenders, but not a complete absence of responsibility (Reppucci, 1999; Scott, 2000; Scott & Grisso, 1997; Zimring, 1998). Similarly, Feld (1999) argues that “Substantive justice requires a rationale for courts to sentence young offenders differently and more leniently than they sentence adult offenders and to recognize youthfulness as a mitigating factor (p. 16).” Cauffman and Steinberg (2000) suggest that youthful choices to offend may be based on an immature capacity to make decisions or be driven by transient developmental influences. If this is the case, then the presumptions of autonomy, free will, and rational choice on which adult criminal responsibility is based become weaker, and the criminal actions of juveniles are less blameworthy than similar acts of adults (Scott & Grisso, 1997). As such, youth should be subject to less punishment. In both adjudicative and culpability competence, we believe that a judgment framework rather than an informed consent framework should apply.

During the past five years, our research team has initiated several studies of these issues. We now turn to a discussion of preliminary findings from our studies of adjudicative competence and culpability. We believe that these data provide initial steps in developing a research agenda on these issues.

STUDY 1: COMPETENCE AND EFFECTIVE PARTICIPATION OF JUVENILE DEFENDANTS

The present study expands existing research to clarify the meaning of adolescent competence as a function of both adult competence factors and judgment factors by conceptualizing legally relevant decisions as a function of both judgment and cognitive competence factors with comparisons between adolescents and adults currently involved in the justice system. The analyses reported are guided by two primary questions: (1) Can adolescents perform as effectively as adults on measures of adjudicative competence? (2) Do the processes and outcomes of legally relevant decisions vary according to developmentally linked judgment factors?

METHOD

This report focuses on three sections of a larger interview protocol. Current intellectual functioning was assessed using the Kaufman Brief Intelligence Test (Kaufman & Kaufman, 1990), which comprises Vocabulary (V) and Matrices (M) subscales, representing verbal and nonverbal or performance abilities, respectively. The MacArthur Competence Assessment Tool—Criminal Adjudication (MacCAT-CA; Poythress et al., 1999) measured the understanding, reasoning, and appreciation components of competence to stand trial. Legally relevant decision making is measured using the Judgment Assessment Tool—Adolescents/Adults (JATA; Woolard, Reppucci, & Scott, 1996). Developed specifically for this study, the JATA is a three part interview which describes a male who has committed a robbery and faces a series of decisions: (1) talking with police; (2) consulting with an attorney; and (3) considering a plea bargain in the context of...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Contributors
• Opening Address
• Invited Address: Jingoism, Dogmatism and Other Evils in Law and Psychology: Lessons Learned in the Twentieth Century
• Part 1: Adolescents
• Part 2: Juries
• Part 3: Civil and Criminal Court
• Part 4: Eyewitness Evidence and Testimony
• Part 5: Victims of Crime
• Index