Psychiatry, Psychology and Law articles from April 2005

Psychiatry, Psychology and Law archives from April 2005

Madness, migration and misfortune: the challenge of the bleak tale of Cornelia Rau.(Australia)
April 1, 2005... The story of the mentally ill immigration detainee, Cornelia Rau, has been told by many sectors of the public media. This editorial endeavours to sort fact from fiction and to chronicle the failures in more than one jurisdiction to provide her...

Men behaving badly: current issues in provocation, automatism, mental impairment and criminal responsibility.(Australia)
April 1, 2005... This article sets the scene for the ensuing two articles in this edition by exploring the current legal framework for raising evidence of particular mental states in homicide trials. It examines three case studies of men who were charged with...

Excusing fleeting mental states: provocation, involuntariness and normative practice.(Australia)
April 1, 2005... This article examines how the criminal law takes into account fleeting mental states such as dissociation in response to extraordinary stress (automatism), and loss of self-control due to provocation. It argues that while he partial defence of...

Depressive rage and criminal responsibility.(Australia)
April 1, 2005... Violence committed in the setting of rage poses particular challenges with respect to determining criminal responsibility. One such challenge relates to the fact that even moderately severe, nonpsychotic depressive disorders can increase the...

Afterword: options for the reform of provocation, automatism and mental impairment.(Australia)
April 1, 2005... This article considers some of the options for restricting the ambit of claims of men who kill their estranged partners. It provides an overview of the arguments set out in the preceding articles and examines the recent recommendations by the...

Lawyers: a role to play in the detection of mental impairment?(South Australia)
April 1, 2005... Mental impairment can be considered at three temporally distinct stages of the South Australian criminal justice system. Present literature gives modest support for the routine consideration of mental impairment by lawyers, but fails to clarify...

Can neuropsychological assessment predict capacity to manage personal finances? A comparison between brain impaired individuals with and without administrators.(Australia)
April 1, 2005... There is currently little research addressing methods for assessing capacity to manage personal finances. The current study investigated the ability of neuropsychological assessment to assist in determining capacity to manage personal finances...

Psychiatrists' perceptions of administrative review: a Victorian empirical study.
April 1, 2005... In 1987, the Mental Health Review Board commenced operations under the Mental Health Act 1986. Its principal purpose was to provide an independent review of persons involuntarily detained for treatment of mental illness. These legislative...

Distractors and distressors in involuntary status decision-making.(Australia)
April 1, 2005... This article examines a series of emotive and judgmental descriptors that from time to time are availed of in he context of civil commitment of patients by both clinicians and mental health review tribunals. Those which are scrutinised are:...

A note on the association of schizophrenia after head injury: causal or coincidental?(Denmark)
April 1, 2005... It has long been assumed on the basis of clinical reports that when schizophrenia is diagnosed after traumatic head injury there is a causal relationship. However, caution is urged in the medico-legal setting before assuming such causality....

The detection of deception: the effects of first and second language on lie detection ability.
April 1, 2005... An experiment was designed to test behavioural differences in the detection of deception arising from investigative interviews conducted in either a first or second language. A two (Cantonese or English) by two (deception or truthfulness)...

The confidence-accuracy and decision latency-accuracy relationships in children's eyewitness identification.
April 1, 2005... This study examined the eyewitness confidence-accuracy and decision latency-accuracy relations in a sample of children (N = 240) and a control group of adolescents (N = 159). Participants witnessed a video of a simulated crime and later...

Aiding the performance of older eyewitnesses: enhanced non-biased line-up instructions and line-up presentation.
April 1, 2005... The study examined possible methods for improving the performance of older eyewitnesses on identification lineups. Young and old adults viewed a simulated crime event involving a young and old perpetrator, and were subsequently asked to...

Law-and-order politics, public-opinion polls and the media.(Australia)
April 1, 2005... Over the past two decades, considerable political rhetoric has focused on the need to get tough on crime. Justification for this hard-line approach has been the public's apparent concern about rising crime rates and its increasing...

Homelessness, mental health and law enforcement.(Queensland, Australia)
April 1, 2005... This paper examines police enforcement of the Vagrants, Gaming & Other Offences Act 1931 (Qld) and the Mental Health Act 2000 (Qld) and the implications for Brisbane's homeless population. Research was obtained through field work conducted with...

People with an intellectual disability in the prisons.(Australia)
April 1, 2005... This article reports results from a total population of persons with an intellectual disability in Western Australia arrested on or after April 1, 1984. It is part of a longitudinal study which 'tracked' offenders with intellectual disability...

Sentencing mentally disordered offenders: factors that predict sentencers' decisions about treatment.(Victoria, Australia)
April 1, 2005... This research examines the way that judges and magistrates sentence mentally disordered people. It identifies case court and offender factors that predict whether a sentencer imposes a treatment requirement on an offender. An archival data set...

Comparing British and Australian fear of terrorism pre and post the Iraqi war.
April 1, 2005... Public attitudes to terrorism influence government positions in opinion polls and highlight the effectiveness of terrorism as a political strategy. British (N = 47) and Australian (N = 42) participants' fear of terrorism at the onset of, and...

Restoration or renovation? Evaluating restorative justice outcomes.(Australia)
April 1, 2005... Critics of restorative justice claim that its popularity is based on 'humanistic sentiment' and suggest that the process is incapable of achieving its aim of restoring victims and offenders. The current study sought to establish if restorative...

The LSI-R in an Australian setting: implications for risk/needs decision-making in forensic contexts.(Level of Service Inventory-Revised)
April 1, 2005... The Level of Service Inventory-Revised (LSI-R) is an actuarial tool that was created and normed in Canadian forensic settings. The tool is also used in Australia to conduct a risk/needs analysis of inmates, so that appropriate service provision...

Positive psychology and the demise of defamation.(Australia)
April 1, 2005... Defamation is one of the more complex and fluid areas of the law and varies considerably across the Australian jurisdictions. There are moves to unify defamation law. The threshold issue that is raised in any such process is whether there is in...

Expert evidence in the family court: the new regime.(Australia)
April 1, 2005... The author reviews the two major decisions of the Family Court of Australia in relation to expert evidence: Re W and W (Abuse Allegations; Expert Evidence) [2001] Fam CA 216 and Re W (Sex Abuse: Standard of Proof) [2004] Fam CA 768. He...

Mental state defences before the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia: Prosecutor v Esad Landzo: International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, Appeals Chamber Judge Hunt, Judge Riad, Judge Nieto-Navia, Judge Bennouna, Judge Pocar20, February 2001.
April 1, 2005... Potentially, numbers of defendants before the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (and other such tribunals, e.g., in Rwanda and Cambodia) may have mental states which impact upon their criminal responsibility and...

The Lobotomist.(Book Review)
April 1, 2005... The Lobotomist J. El-Hai John Wiley & Sons, New Jersey, 2005, 362pp, incl index., hb, $46.95. The Lobotomist tells the story of Dr Walter Freeman, described by the author as 'the most scorned physician of the 20th century'. He is the...