Abstract
The prevention of sexual violence is a major goal of sexual health. In cases of accused sexual offenders, the assessment of diminished criminal responsibility of the accused is one of the most important procedures undertaken by experts in the German legal system. This assessment follows a two-stage method assessing first the severity of a paraphilic disorder and then second criteria for or against diminished capacity. The present study examines the predictive validity of two different sets of criteria for the assessment of criminal responsibility in the context of paraphilic disorders combined with sexual offending. Two exemplary case vignettes of two suspected sexual offenders were developed to assess the criteria. For each participant, one of the two exemplary case vignettes was randomly presented. The presentation of the two different sets of criteria was also randomized, so that each participant was assigned only one of the two criteria sets to rate one of the presented cases. N = 349 participants from different professional backgrounds (mental health and legal professionals) completed their assessments and were included in the data analysis. The data were evaluated using logistic regression. Results show that the more recently published criteria set (Briken and Müller, 2014) predicts both the severity of the disorder as well as the diminished capacity twice as good as the older criteria set of Boetticher et al. (2005) currently used regularly for forensic court reports. In preliminary conclusion, the new criteria of Briken and Müller (2014) form an empirically based assessment of criminal responsibility. However, the proposed criteria cannot replace an extensive exploration of the accused person and a careful file analysis. Validity and reliability of the results are also limited due to the methodical choice of a vignette study.
Highlights
The assessment of criminal responsibility is subject to the individual national legal system and is handled heterogeneously
We focus exclusively on the influence of paraphilic disorders, for which in the German legal system the question of criminal responsibility is much less clear than for other disorders, for example, the presence of an acute schizophrenic disorder
Each case was constructed with a specific aim: the first case was constructed in a way that it would indicate no SASA and no diminished capacity, and the second was constructed so that it would indicate SASA and diminished capacity
Summary
The assessment of criminal responsibility is subject to the individual national legal system and is handled heterogeneously. It represents, besides matters of legal prognosis of criminal offenders and of credibility assessment, the most common task for psychiatric and psychological experts in German court proceedings. More common diagnoses result in greater agreement than those diagnoses that are less common or those that are based on vague or confoundable criteria, i.e., sadism This inconsistency in diagnoses might be the result of imprecise diagnostic criteria or an indication of the low prevalence of the disorders in question, another potential factor could be the experience of the experts
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