Abstract
Central to jurisprudence is the construct of legal competency. In criminal courts for adults, the most frequent question for mental health examiners is that of the defendant’s competence to proceed. Increasingly, Juvenile courts must address the competence of youth brought before them. Currently, about half of the states in the USA and new states are being added every year to this count have statutory provisions for the assessment of juvenile competency. Competence To Proceed examinations for juveniles share some common elements with those of adults but also have significant differences. Such differences include concepts not utilized in adult evaluations such as developmental maturity and the need to assess juveniles against a “Juvenile Norm,” of which available data are limited. Additionally these evaluations must be framed within a developmental context specific to youth and thus require additional training and specialization in child and adolescent psychology beyond the core competencies required of forensic practitioners in adult court. This chapter outlines case law, relevant research and illustrates suggested assessment methodologies using illustrative cases.
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Notes
- 1.
1For the Court’s information, the diagnostic specifier “NOS” is used in situations where the clinical presentation conforms to the general guidelines for a mental disorder in a specific diagnostic class, but the symptomatic picture does not meet criteria for any of the specific diagnoses.
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Davis, D.L., Kukor, T.J. (2014). Competence to Proceed and Juvenile Courts. In: Morewitz, S., Goldstein, M. (eds) Handbook of Forensic Sociology and Psychology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-7178-3_9
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