• Manual: 2012  192pp paperbound   ISBN: 9781568871387
  
• Easel: 2012  70pp spiral bound   ISBN: 9781568871394
• Forms: 2012  6pp  Package of 10   ISBN: 9781568871400
  

Prepublication Information

The Miranda Rights Comprehension Instruments (MRCI) are the revised version of Grisso’s Instruments for Assessing Understanding and Appreciation of Miranda Rights.  Like Grisso’s original instruments, the MRCI are designed for use by forensic mental health practitioners who have been asked to evaluate defendants’ capacities to have waived their Miranda rights during police interrogations.  These instruments provide multi-method approaches to assessing a person’s current understanding of the Miranda warnings and appreciation of the significance of the adversarial nature of interrogation, right to silence, and right to counsel.  This can assist the examiner in making inferences about the person’s abilities at the time of the interrogation.

An update and revision of the original instruments was necessary in light of subsequent developments in law, research, and forensic assessment.  The Miranda warnings contained in the instruments have been simplified and a commonly administered fifth warning has been added so that the MRCI can be applied more generally across jurisdictions. 

The psychometric properties of the instruments have been refined using contemporary methods of statistical analysis.  The normative data have been updated; norms based on 21^st century samples of juvenile justice and community youth are included in the 2012 manual, and new adult norms will be available in 2014-2015.

Based on the results of decades of research on the original instruments and two comprehensive research studies of the MRCI’s reliability and validity, these standardized instruments offer a structured, competency-based testing approach that employs objective scoring criteria.  They permit the examiner to compare the performance of examinees to the performance of normative samples of juvenile justice and community-based youth. 

A specially designed easel provides all of the stimuli and examiner prompts that are required for administration of the four instruments, and forms are available for recording and scoring responses.  The manual offers a comprehensive description of the instruments, their development, tables of norms, approaches to interpreting the instruments’ scores, and a discussion of the scientific, professional, and legal status of the instruments’ admissibility in court as a basis for expert opinion. 

NOTE:  All of the MRCI materials (Manual, Easel, & Forms) are different from those used in the original Instruments for Assessing Understanding and Appreciation of Miranda Rights. Juvenile and adult defendants can be evaluated using the same MRCI Easel and Forms; only the data in the Manual will change when the adult norms are available.  At the current time, the MRCI manual provides only juvenile norms.  Adult norms will be forthcoming in 2014-2015.  Until the adult norms are available, it is anticipated that forensic mental health evaluators will continue to use the original instruments (Instruments for Assessing Understanding and Appreciation of Miranda Rights) when evaluating adult defendants and will use the new MRCI when evaluating juvenile defendants. 

Individuals who purchase the MRCI materials from Professional Resource Press prior to the publication of the adult norms will receive a special offer and discount on the adult normative materials when they are available.

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