Daniel A. Krauss - Böcker

Forensic mental health professionals provide a range of services to courts, attorneys, law enforcement agencies, and correctional facilities. Yet despite the importance of understanding the law, most forensic mental health professionals do not have any formal legal training, which can make it challenging for them to develop a sufficient understanding of relevant legal cases, rules, and statutes. Forensic Mental Health Practice and the Law is an up-to-date, scholarly, and comprehensive primer that provides foundational knowledge about the laws most relevant to forensic practice. The authors address topics that are most applicable to forensic mental health professionals in their varied roles as clinicians, researchers, and consultants, including relevant court cases, statutes, court rules, administrative regulations, and ethical standards and guidelines. As they show, having knowledge of the legal system and relevant laws can lead to several benefits for forensic mental health professionals, including increased competence in performing forensic mental health assessments, conducting forensically relevant research, providing consultation to the legal system, and communicating results to legal decision-makers. To this end, the book offers discussion of exemplar state laws that differ markedly from federal law, examples of majority and minority approaches among the states to certain legal topics, and detailed tables that provide citations to the relevant laws in all 50 states.

The first of a two-volume set on the Psychology of the Courtroom, Jury Psychology: Social Aspects of Trial Processes offers a definitive account of the influence of trial procedures on juror decision-making. A wide range of topics are covered including pre-trial publicity and inadmissible evidence, jury selection, jury instruction, and death penalty cases, as well as decision-making in civil trials. In addition, a number of global issues are discussed, including procedural justice issues and theoretical models of juror decision-making. Throughout the volume the authors make recommendations for improving trial procedures where jurors are involved, and they discuss how the problems and potential solutions are relevant to courts around the world.

Expertise in Court: Perspectives on Testimony is the second of a two-volume set on the Psychology of the Courtroom. The authors, a renowned group of psychology and legal scholars, offer definitive coverage of the use of psychological expert testimony and evidence in a variety of legal contexts. They explore the controversies that surround it, from questions of its admissibility to its effects on eventual juror decisions. A wide range of topics are covered including system and estimator variables in eyewitness identification, expert testimony on psychological syndromes, the insanity defence and sexual harassment, how child sexual abuse is used by the courts, and recent research on false confessions. They also provide a comparative analysis exploring how different types of psychological expert testimony and evidence are used by different countries’ legal systems. All the chapters conclude by making specific recommendations for how psychological research and information could be better utilized by courts around the world.