The Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution states that a criminal defendant has the right to counsel for his defense, and the Fourteenth Amendment states that defendants must be provided due process and equal protection under law. Despite this, it is unclear whether indigent defendants in the United States-who are disproportionately ethnic minorities-are receiving such protections when it com...

The goal of this study was to examine the growing use of neurological and behavioral genetic evidence by criminal defendants in US criminal law. Judicial opinions issued between 2005-12 that discussed the use of neuroscience or behavioral genetics by criminal defendants were identified, coded and analysed. Criminal defendants are increasingly introducing such evidence to challenge defendants' c...

We examined the clinical, criminal, and sociodemographic characteristics of all white-collar crime defendants referred to the evaluation unit of a state center for forensic psychiatry. With 29,310 evaluations in a 12-year period, we found 70 defendants charged with embezzlement, 3 with health care fraud, and no other white-collar defendants (based on the eight crimes widely accepted as white-co...

This article shows that, as to proffers of asserted expert testimony, civil defendants win their Daubert reliability challenges to plaintiffs’ proffers most of the time, and that criminal defendants virtually always lose their reliability challenges to government proffers. And, when civil defendants’ proffers are challenged by plaintiffs, those defendants usually win, but when criminal defendan...

In the United States, an accused person has a constitutionally protected right to serve as his or her own lawyer, even if this means he or she has "a fool for a client." In the current study, information from more than 2,700 articles in the LEXIS "U.S. New, Combined" database was used to produce what the authors believe is the psychiatric literature's first characterization of a group of pro se...

There are an estimated 60,000 evaluations annually for competence to stand trial for felony indictments and likely more for misdemeanor indictments. Thus, there is an increasing interest in determining factors associated with a defendant's likelihood of being restored to competence to stand trial. Although previous studies have found that a misdemeanor charge predicts significantly less likelih...

The presence of a jury is intended to keep criminal trials fair and objective, but sometimes jurors’ perceptions, biases, and beliefs in stereotypes affect verdicts. Defendant and juror characteristics such as social class and age, often lead to differing judgments and perceptions, but limited research has been done on the interaction between these characteristics. This study examines the effec...

IN United States v. Consolidated Laundries Corp.' the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit has expanded the scope of the public prosecutor's duty to secure a fair trial to defendants in criminal proceedings. A new trial was ordered on the finding that material evidence had been "negligently suppressed." Consolidated arose as an antitrust prosecution against a number of linen supply companies...

This study examines relationships between homelessness and findings of incompetency to stand trial in a sample of mentally disordered offenders. All 263 defendants referred for competency evaluation over a six-month period by the Criminal and Supreme Courts in Manhattan were studied. Each defendant was evaluated by two forensic psychiatrists using a structured interview protocol. After removing...