INSTRUMENTS FOR ASSESSING, UNDERSTANDING & APPRECIATION OF MIRANDA RIGHTS*
(Book, Easel, & Forms)

By:
THOMAS GRISSO

* This product is available for sale only to qualified professionals who have received at least a BA in psychology, psychiatry, counseling, social work, or a closely related field and relevant training in the use of assessment instruments or verification of appropriate licensure, certification, association membership, listing in the National Register of Health Service Providers in Psychology, ABPP recognition from the American Board of Professional Psychology, or other evidence of appropriate qualifications and training. If you have not already established your qualifications with Professional Resource Press, please fill out the Qualification Form.

    When attorneys and courts have questions about the validity of criminal defendants' waiver of their Miranda rights at the time of police interrogation, forensic clinical examiners may be asked to assess defendants' capacities to understand and appreciate the "Miranda warnings" that they waived.  This publication offers the only specialized instruments available to clinicians to assist them in these evaluations.  Three of these instruments allow the clinician to employ a multi-method approach to assessing understanding of the Miranda warnings, and a fourth examines the defendant's capacities to appreciate the significance of the rights in the context of police questioning, the attorney-client relationship, and court proceedings.
    Based on the results of a comprehensive 3-year research study of their reliability and validity, these standardized instruments offer a structured, competency-based testing approach that employs objective scoring criteria, which permits the examiner to compare the performance of examinees to the performance of large normative samples of juvenile and adult offenders.  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, and a discussion of the scientific and professional status of the instruments relevant for meeting legal criteria for admissibility as a basis for expert opinion in legal cases.

REVIEWS

     "Perhaps more than any other psychologist in the country, Dr. Grisso has contributed to advances in the field by promoting the need for scientifically grounded research and data-based forensic assessments.  Dr. Grisso's groundbreaking research on the frequent inability of juveniles and adults to make legal Constitutional waivers of Miranda rights helped establish forensic psychology as a field that can and must rely upon objective data.  This publication makes accessible to clinicians a number of forensic assessment instruments related to this area of psycho-legal practice.
     "This material provides objective, data-based normative assessment instruments which, when used with other sources of information, provide essential information to both the forensic practitioner and the courts.  The test materials and detailed scoring system are user friendly and contribute significantly to the reliability of these instruments.  Sections describing the legal relevance of these instruments and the appellate decision citations related to Dr. Grisso's research should persuade both the clinician and the court that these assessment instruments meet both the Frye and Daubert standards.  The publication of these instruments as standardized tests represents a major contribution to the field of forensic assessment."
     *Alan M. Goldstein, PhD, ABPP, Diplomate in Forensic Psychology, Associate Professor of Psychology, John Jay College of Criminal Justice

* This product is available for sale only to qualified professionals who have received at least a BA in psychology, psychiatry, counseling, social work, or a closely related field and relevant training in the use of assessment instruments or verification of appropriate licensure, certification, association membership, listing in the National Register of Health Service Providers in Psychology, ABPP recognition from the American Board of Professional Psychology, or other evidence of appropriate qualifications and training. If you have not already established your qualifications with Professional Resource Press, please fill out the Qualification Form.