Examinations of Competency to Stand Trial
Foundations in Mental Health Case Law
Richard I. Frederick, Richart L. DeMier, & Karin Towers
“A very intriguing and insightful approach to educating psychologists and other mental health professionals regarding the intimate ‘thinking’ of our nation’s judges. Highly readable and yet surprisingly comprehensive. An excellent compilation of judicial reflections, historical while extraordinarily current.”
“Examinations of Competency to Stand Trial provides forensic evaluators and attorneys with the basic legal tools necessary to understand the nature and scope of competency evaluations in the criminal process. The book contains easy-to-read versions of the most important legal cases on competency to stand trial and plead guilty, together with helpful commentary about their implications.”
“The volume covers several critical issues, such as thresholds for competency examination, the way Courts respond to treatment of defendants found incompetent to stand trial, and the relevancy of amnesia to competency to stand trial. Each section has a conclusory part call ‘Implications for Examiners,’ which is concise, coherent and ties together the case law presented in that section. The volume does an outstanding job of informing clinicians about the Court’s perspective so that clinicians doing forensic work can understand this perspective in order to better perform their evaluations and reports. This is an outstanding, creative and thoughtful, yet completely user-friendly volume.”