Monthly Archives: September 2011

Dummy’s Guide to Forensic Risk Assessment

A risk assess­ment iden­ti­fies risk fac­tors, antic­i­pated level of risk, and nec­es­sary risk reduc­tion and man­age­ment strate­gies. Conclusion lan­guage uti­lizes spec­i­fi­ca­tion of risk fac­tors and risk reduc­tion strate­gies that may mit­i­gate iden­ti­fied risk fac­tors. Risk assess­ments should include both risk like­li­hood and risk reduc­tion. Risk assess­ment assumes prob­a­bil­ity of recur­rence in the absence of risk

Dummy’s Guide to Risk Reduction for Sex Offenders

For human beings, there are two pri­mary classes of con­straints against doing wrong or bad: intrin­sic and extrin­sic. Intrinsic con­straints focus on the offender’s inter­nal­ized norms, con­science, empa­thy capac­ity, impulse con­trol, and abil­ity to fore­see and be con­strained by antic­i­pated con­se­quences of the offense behav­ior. Intrinsic con­straints against offend­ing behav­ior may be weak­ened through the

Is the testimony of experts at child sex abuse trials helpful?

The tes­ti­mony of experts in child sex abuse tri­als is con­tro­ver­sial. There are seri­ous legal con­straints on expert tes­ti­mony con­cern­ing cred­i­bil­ity of the wit­ness, prop­erly the domain of the trier of fact (see US vs. Brooks, a court mar­tial, where my tes­ti­mony was rejected by a mil­i­tary court of appeals as cross­ing the line).  Thus,

Forensic conundrum: Geriatric competency to stand trial evaluations

Does old age ren­der you incom­pe­tent? Incompetent elders have started show­ing up in increas­ing num­bers, in both civil (testamentary/contractual com­pe­tency, guardian­ship pro­ceed­ings) and crim­i­nal are­nas (com­pe­tency to stand trial). We have adopted what we con­sider a pow­er­ful new assess­ment approach to foren­sic neu­rocog­ni­tive assess­ments based on Pearson’s WAIS-IV-WMS-IV-ACS combo and started look­ing at the data. Table A.2