Abstract
The health care system is responsible for the implementation of court-ordered compulsory psychiatric care. In order to ensure that the health care system fulfills the statutory responsibility for crime protection, the legislature has added a control function to the prosecuting authority. Case law shows that the courts place emphasis on this control function in assessing whether court-ordered compulsory psychiatric care is necessary to protect society. This article highlights the prosecution’s legal remedies and professional prerequisites for fulfilling the control function.
Highlights
How should society protect itself from the risk of serious offences committed by persons with severe mental illness, and who are considered criminally insane? This question includes several difficult issues, among them the division of responsibility between two major sectors of society
The justice sector can establish its own secure psychiatric institutions, i.e., a kind of ‘criminal justice hospital’; alternatively, crime protection can be left to the health sector’s regular psychiatric health care institutions, in which case the health sector is attributed the role of an agent within the criminal justice system
This special penal sanction was enacted in 1997,4 implemented in 2002, and was introduced as a supplement to the civil system for compulsory psychiatric treatment based on the Mental Health Act 1999.5 Though both forms of compulsory psychiatric treatment have crime prevention as their purpose, they differ significantly in how they are established, implemented and terminated
Summary
How should society protect itself from the risk of serious offences committed by persons with severe mental illness, and who are considered criminally insane? This question includes several difficult issues, among them the division of responsibility between two major sectors of society. Ill criminals who are considered criminally insane cannot be held criminally responsible and subjected to punishment This means that the justice sector cannot use imprisonment to protect against the risk that these persons commit new serious crimes. As a part of the Special Sanction Reform in 1997, the prosecution authority became the health sector’s control body during the implementation of court-ordered compulsory psychiatric care.[2]. Their legal instrument is the right to appeal specific decisions concerning crime protection. The core of the control function is to supervise the psychiatric health care system in terms of its responsibility for protection against future crimes.
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