Thesis (M.A.)--Rowan University, 2009. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.A.) - Simon Fraser University, 2005. / Theses (Dept. of Psychology) / Simon Fraser University. Also issued in digital format and available on the World Wide Web.

abstract: Juror impartiality is necessary for a fair and just legal system, but is true juror impartiality realistic? The current study investigated the role of implicit and explicit social-cognitive biases in jurors’ conceptualizations of insanity, and the influence of those biases in juror verdict decisions. It was hypothesized that by analyzing the role of implicit and explicit biases in insanity defense cases, jurors’ attitudes towards those with mental illnesses and attitudes towards the insanity defense would influence jurors’ final verdict decisions. Two hundred and two participants completed an online survey which included a trial vignette incorporating an insanity defense (adapted from Maeder et al., 2016), the Insanity Defense Attitude Scale (Skeem, Louden, & Evans, 2004), Community Attitudes Towards the Mentally Ill Scale (Taylor & Dear, 1981), and an Implicit Association Test (Greenwald et al., 1998). While implicit associations concerning mental illness and dangerousness were significantly related to mock jurors’ verdicts, they no longer were when explicit insanity defense attitudes were added to a more complex model including all measured attitudes and biases. Insanity defense attitudes were significantly related to jurors’ verdicts over and above attitudes about the mentally ill and implicit biases concerning the mentally ill. The potentially biasing impact of jurors’ insanity defense attitudes and the impact of implicit associations about the mentally ill in legal judgments are discussed. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Psychology 2018

Thesis (M.A.)--University of North Carolina Wilmington, 2008. / Includes appendixes. Title from PDF title page (viewed May 27, 2009) Includes bibliographical references (p. 49-52)

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Tennessee, Knoxville, 2009. / Title from title page screen (viewed on Oct. 23, 2009). Thesis advisor: Lynn Sacco. Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

abstract: Both law and medicine are interpretive practices, and both systems have historically worked in tandem, however ineffectively or tumultuously. The law is, by social mandate, imagined as a "fixed" system of social control, made up of rules and procedures grounded in a reality that is independent of language; although we know that law is both revised and interpreted every day in courtroom practice, to imagine the law, the system that keeps bad people behind bars and good people safe, as indeterminate or, worse, fallible, produces social anxieties that upend our cultural assumptions about fairness that predate our judicial system. This imaginary stability, then, is ultimately what prevents the legal system from evolving in consonance with developments in the mental health professions, as inadequate as that discursive system may be for describing and categorizing the infinite possibilities of mental illness, specifically where it is relevant to the commission of a crime. Ultimately, the insanity plea raises the specter of the endless interpretability of the law and mental illness and, therefore, the frailty of the justice system, which makes each insanity defense trial emblematic of larger social anxieties about social control, fairness, and susceptibility to mental illness or the actions of mentally ill people. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. English 2014

Past literature has indicated that jury instructions are not written in ways that result in optimal juror comprehension, and can be improved through various ways of simplification. Prototypes of the insanity defense have also been found to influence juror decision-making. Additionally, individual factors such as attitudes toward and myth endorsement of the insanity defense can influence verdict. The following study explored these effects of jury instruction format, insanity defense consistency, and participant factors on jury understanding and decision-making. Three hundred and eighty jury eligible community members were recruited online for this study. Participants were first asked questions pertaining to attitudes and myths about the insanity defense. Afterwards, each participant read one of two vignettes (an insanity defense consistent case and an insanity defense inconsistent case), and then read one of three jury instructions (traditional, simplified, or flow-chart versions). The participants then reached individual verdicts and answered factual questions about the insanity defense and their perceptions on the defendant. Results indicated that simplified instructions increased participant knowledge over the traditional and flow-chart instructions, but did not influence verdict selection overall. Consistency, myth endorsement, attitudes, and perceptions of the defendant were also all found to contribute to the verdict. These results contribute to the current research on comprehension of jury instructions, especially in the context of an insanity defense case, and may provide additional information for attorneys to consider during the voir dire process.

In response to public opposition to the insanity defense, the Guilty But Mentally Ill(GBMI) verdict was enacted with the intention of limiting the number of insanity acquittals and alleviating the public’s concerns. Prior research suggests, however, that many jurors are making verdict decisions with limited knowledge of the dispositional consequences of the GBMI and NGRI verdicts. Further, jurors may erroneously assume that the GBMI verdict is a compromise between a NGRI and guilty verdict, which mitigates punishment. In reality, the dispositional consequences of a GBMI verdict are equivalent to or more restrictive than a guilty verdict. The current study examined the impact of informing jurors of the dispositional consequences of the GBMI and NGRI verdicts. In addition, it explores whether mock jurors’ attitudes toward the insanity defense, individuals with mental illness, and perceptions of the defendant’s dangerousness strengthens or attenuates the impact of informing mock jurors of dispositional consequences. Participants (N = 488) read a case summary of an apparently mentally ill male defendant charged with first-degree murder. Half of the participants were informed of the dispositional consequences of GBMI and NGRI verdicts, while the other half of participants received no such information. Then, they were asked to choose individual verdicts and complete a questionnaire that assessed attitudes toward the insanity defense, attitudes toward individuals with mental illness, and perceptions of the defendant’s dangerousness. Results indicate that informing participants of dispositional consequences of the GBMI and NGRI verdicts increases the likelihood that the NGRI verdict is selected over the GBMI verdict. In addition, participants who had more favorable attitudes toward the insanity defense and perceived the defendant as less dangerous selected the NGRI verdict over the GBMI verdict at an even higher rate when they were informed of dispositional consequences. The implications for educating jurors in trials that include the GBMI verdict option are discussed.

The prevalence and consequences of the insanity plea, titled "guilty except for insanity" in the State of Oregon, are fraught with misconceptions. The use of the plea requires a complex set of interactions between the mental health and criminal justice systems, and comes with severe costs for people who use it. Most of the research on the psychological aspects of the insanity plea emphasizes empirical validity in the form of risk assessment instruments and/or the biomedical model with its focus on disease and illness. This thesis analyzes from community psychology and critical theory perspectives the decision process of hearings held by the Psychiatric Security Review Board. The critical analysis draws specifically on Michel Foucault's (1977) theory of knowledge and power to address three questions: 1. Are there identifiable prototypical narratives of risk that are constructed around evidence admitted to a hearing? 2a. Are these risk narratives deployed differently in public PSRB hearing as opposed to an individual interview? 2b. Do the District Attorney, Defense Attorney, and clinician deploy risk narratives differently? 3. As professionals that create, administer, and interpret risk assessment instruments, how do clinicians use these risk narratives to support or refute the arguments of each side? Transcripts and audio recordings of hearings were thematically content analyzed and compared to address these questions. One overarching theme and four subsidiary themes emerged from the data that describe how risk is indirectly discussed in the formal procedures of the hearings and in individual interviews. The overarching theme is Insight and the four subsidiary themes are Elopement, Compliance, Drug-use, and Treatment. Compared across settings, the hearings were highly structured whereas the individual interviews allowed for a more complex analysis and explication of positions. In the context of the PSRB hearings, the testimony of the clinician was of primary importance in determination of insight and the source of information on the patient along the subsidiary themes.

This quantitative exploratory study surveyed 64 South African clinical psychologists' opinions of the insanity defence. Clinical psychologists are increasingly becoming meaningful contributors to the judicial process in South Africa with regard to criminal incapacity. It is therefore considered important to canvas their opinions. To the author's knowledge this is the first research on psychologists' opinions of the defence in South Africa, possibly internationally. A standardized Likert scale developed by Skeem and Evans-DeCicco (2004) to gauge jury views on the insanity defence in the United States was used as the data collection tool. This research employed an overall correlational research design. Due to heterogenous variances the more liberal assumptions of non-parametric tests were used to extrapolate findings. The bulk of opinion rested in the moderate to ambivalent support ranges, with few strongly positive or negative opinions of the insanity defence. Significant results suggest that female psychologists, regardless of race, showed less support of the insanity defence than their male counterparts. Furthermore, those whose primary therapeutic orientation was psychodynamic had less support than those who practiced other modalities. However, a disappointingly small sample size and low reliability of the scale makes the generalisability of the results tentative, and thus further research is needed to verify these findings / Thesis (M.Soc.Sc.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2007.