Psychopathy, Homicide, and the Courts: Working the System

This study investigated the effects of psychopathy on homicidal post-offense behavior, denying the charges at court, appeals of the lower court conviction, and final sentencing. A sample of 546 offenders prosecuted for a homicide and convicted in Finland during 1995-2004 was examined. Their post-offense behavior, self-reported reasons for the killing, charges, sentences, and psychopathic traits, as measured by the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R; Hare, 2003), were coded from official file information. Offenders with high PCL-R scores were more likely than others to leave the crime scene without informing anyone of the killing, to deny the charges, to be convicted for involuntary manslaughter rather than for manslaughter or murder, and to receive permission from the Supreme Court to appeal their lower court sentence. Given the risk that psychopathic offenders pose for violent crime, the finding that they are able to manipulate the criminal justice system is cause for concern. In his comedy, As You Like It, William Shakespeare wrote, "All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players" (Moston, 1998). In referring to this famous quotation Erving Goffman (1959) commented, "All the world is not, of course, a stage, but the crucial ways in which it isn't are not easy to specify." That is, it is often difficult to determine the extent to which interactions among individuals involve play-acting or impression management (also called self-presentation), a goal-directed process by which people try to control the impressions other people form of them. Impression management clearly is highly relevant to the investigation and prosecution of crime, including police interviews and court proceedings, yet is has remained a relatively unexplored concept in forensic psychology. Although there are courses for practitioners, especially lawyers, on how to manage the image they present to the court, juries, and to their clients and colleagues, information on how suspects and offenders manage the image they present to the criminal justice system is relatively sparse. Psychopathy is a clinical construct defined by a constellation of affective, charm and the persistent violation of social norms and expectations as perhaps the most important forensic concept in the early 21st century (Monahan, 2006).