Abstract
Insanity definition and the threshold for satisfying its legal criteria tend to vary depending on the jurisdictions. Yet, in Western countries, the legal standards for insanity often rely on the presence of cognitive and/or volitional impairment of the defendant at crime time. Despite some efforts having been made to guide and structure criminal responsibility evaluations, a valid instrument that could be useful to guide forensic psychiatrists’ criminal responsibility assessments in different jurisdictions is lacking. This is a gap that needs to be addressed, considering the significant forensic and procedural implications of psychiatric evaluations. In addition, differences in methodology used in insanity assessments may also have consequences for the principle of equal rights for all citizens before the law, which should be guaranteed in the European Union. We developed an instrument, the Defendant’s Insanity Assessment Support Scale (DIASS), which can be useful to support, structure, and guide the insanity assessment across different jurisdictions, in order to improve reliability and consistency of such evaluations.
Highlights
Insanity evaluations are among the most complex and controversial mental health assessments that psychiatrists and psychologists perform[1,2]
It was used because it proved to be a theoretical model on decision-making with wide experimental empirical evidence on patients, on patients affected by mental disorders[31,32,33,34,35,36,37,38] and cognitive dysfunctions[28,39,40,41,42,43,44,45]
This decisionmaking capacity model could straightforwardly be adapted to the forensic evaluation of criminal responsibility regarding the understanding dimension, the appreciation dimension, and the reasoning dimension
Summary
Insanity evaluations are among the most complex and controversial mental health assessments that psychiatrists and psychologists perform[1,2]. A forensic evaluator is expected to perform a retrospective evaluation of the defendant’s state of mind at the time of crime, to ascertain the presence of a mental disease or defect and to further verify the existence of a possible relationship between that state of mind and the criminal behavior. In case such a relationship exists, its impact on the defendant’s responsibility is further evaluated, and the conclusions will be used by the judge to assess the defendant’s legal responsibility.
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