Legal Processes and Adjudication in Mental Incompetency Proceedings
- 1 July 1972
- journal article
- Published by Oxford University Press (OUP) in Social Problems
- Vol. 20 (1) , 57-64
- https://doi.org/10.2307/799500
Abstract
Court records of mental incompetency proceedings for a five-year period from a single county were analyzed to determine (1) the extent of actual involvement of the legal system in the cases, and (2) whether the adjudication was correlated with the legal variables and with two characteristics of the examining physicians. It was concluded that the legal system is only peripherally involved in incompetency cases and that the decisions, rather than being objective medical decisions, were correlated with a number of non-medical factors, including the legal variables and the amount of experience of the examining physicians in these types of cases.Keywords
This publication has 4 references indexed in Scilit:
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- Social Conditions for Rationality: How Urban and Rural Courts Deal with the Mentally IllAmerican Behavioral Scientist, 1964
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