LOGIC AND RELIABILITY OF EVALUATIONS OF COMPETENCE TO STAND TRIAL

Because the trier of fact determines the weight to be assigned to an e xaminer's opinion by assessing the strength and persuasiveness of his ol her analysis of the data, it is essential that forensic reports com municate the examiner's reasoning process. This study analyzes communi ty examiners' reports on competence to stand trial (CST), emphasizing the nature of examiners' (I) expressed conceptualizations of CST and ( 2) reasoning establishing a nexus between CST impairments and symptoms of psychopathology. Expert raters coded 100 randomly selected CST rep orts with respect to a variety of issues, including the examiners' des cription of the defendant's psycholegal deficits, provision of specifi c reasoning to link these deficits to psychopathology, and agreement w ith a paired examiner's global and specific opinions about the defenda nt's impairments, CST reports were found to (I) reflect basic operatio nalizations of competence that fail to incorporate legally relevant fa cets such as a defendant's decisional capacities and (2) adequately do cument clinical findings, bur fail to describe the reasoning underlyin g psycholegal conclusions. Examiners demonstrated moderately high leve ls of agreement on defendant's global CST bat expressed radically dive rgent bases for this opinion. These findings are discussed in light of legal, ethical, and professional standards of practice.