Analyze whether the insanity defense relies too much on mental health experts. Explain with a focus on ultimate opinion testimony.

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Answers may vary.One criticism of the insanity defense is that testifying about insanity forces psychiatrists and clinical psychologists to give opinions about areas where they are not trained-for example, to express "reasonable certainty" rather than probability about a person's mental condition, and to claim greater knowledge about the relationship between psychological knowledge and legal questions than is justified.Within the field of psychology, there is debate on these matters. The debate centers on two related questions: (1) Can clinicians reliably and validly assess mental illness, intellectual disability, neuropsychological disorders, and disorders occurring in childhood and adolescence? (2) Will this assessment permit the formulation of accurate opinions about a defendant's criminal responsibility for acts committed in the past? Researchers have found some support for the reliability and validity of psychologists' evaluations of criminal responsibility. Results from several studies revealed strong agreement (88% to 93%) between evaluators' recommendations and courts' decisions about defendants' criminal responsibility, which is important because courts' decisions are one kind of "outcome validation measure" in this kind of research.Additionally, critics are concerned over the intrusion of psychology and psychiatry into the decision-making process. They want to reserve the decision for the judge or jury. This criticism is an example of the general concern over the use and willingness of experts to answer legal questions for which they possess limited scientific evidence and mental health data. One remedy proposed to solve this problem is to prevent experts from giving what is often called ultimate opinion testimony; that is, they could describe a defendant's mental condition and the effects it could have had on his or her thinking and behavioral control, but they could not state conclusions about whether the defendant was sane or insane. The federal courts, as part of their reforms of the insanity defense, now prohibit mental health experts from offering ultimate opinion testimony about a defendant's insanity. But does this prohibition solve any problems, or is it merely a "cosmetic fix" that has few effects?In a study of whether prohibiting ultimate opinion testimony affects jury decisions, subjects were randomly assigned to read one of 10 different versions of a trial, all of which involved a defendant charged with murdering his boss and pleading insanity as a defense. Some subjects read transcripts in which the mental health experts for both sides gave only diagnostic testimony (that the defendant suffered a mental disorder at the time of the offense); a second group read a version in which the experts gave a diagnosis and then also offered differing penultimate opinions about the effects this disorder had on the defendant's understanding of the wrongfulness of his act; a final group read a transcript in which the experts offered differing diagnoses, penultimate opinions, and ultimate opinion testimony about whether the defendant was sane or insane at the time of the killing. In this study; subjects' verdicts were not significantly different regardless of the type of testimony they read. The lack of difference could be interpreted as evidence that the prohibition of ultimate opinion testimony is unnecessary, or it could indicate that the ban streamlines the trial process without sacrificing any essential information.