The Miranda Rights Comprehension Instruments (MRCI) are new instruments that are available with adult and juvenile norms.
Like Grisso’s Instruments for Assessing Understanding and Appreciation of Miranda Rights (IAU), the MRCI is 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.
This new instrument was necessary given the developments in law, research, and forensic assessment since the original Grisso Instruments for Assessing Understanding and Appreciation of Miranda Rights (IAU). The Miranda warnings contained in the new 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 this instrument have been refined using contemporary methods of statistical analysis. The normative data have been updated; norms based on 21st century samples of juvenile justice, community youth, and adult offenders are included in the new manual.
Based on the results of decades of research on the original Instruments for Assessing Understanding and Appreciation of Miranda Rights (IAU) 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, community-based youth, 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, 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 Instruments for Assessing Understanding and Appreciation of Miranda Rights (IAU).
Juvenile and adult defendants can be evaluated using the same MRCI Easel and Forms; some of the psychometric criteria published in the original manual (juveniles only) have changed. These changes are reflected in the comprehensive manual. The MRCI are designed for use in evaluations of juvenile and adult defendants ranging in age from 10-65.
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