A matter of life or death: special considerations and heightened practice standards in capital sentencing evaluations

Mental health evaluations at capital sentencing represent a complex and specialized arena of practice. The moral culpability focus of capital sentencing is distinct from guilt-phase considerations of criminal responsibility, and has a specialized literature. Capital violence risk assessment is uniquely oriented to a prison context, relying on past adjustment to incarceration, as well as group statistical data specific to capital offenders and other inmate groups. Personality testing is a more complex consideration in capital sentencing evaluations. The implications of interviewing the defendant, as well as the parameters and documentation of an interview, make full disclosure and informed consent of particular importance. Defense- and prosecution-retained experts are subject to specific ethical vulnerabilities. These are examined in this paper through the lens of current professional standards.     

Reducing psychopathic violence: A review of the treatment literature

Psychopathy reflects a pathological form of personality that predisposes individuals to risk for perpetration of chronic and severe violence across their lifespan. The violence attributable to psychopathic persons constitutes a substantial portion of the societal burden to the public health and criminal justice systems and thus necessitates significant attention by prevention experts. However, there is a relatively nascent literature that has examined psychopathic persons' response to treatment, especially considering violence as an outcome. Nevertheless, there have been repeated averments about the amenability (or lack thereof) of psychopathy to treatment. In the present paper, we attempt to provide a comprehensive review of studies assessing the relation of psychopathy to violence outcomes following intervention. Our review of studies suggests there is reason to suspect that specific and tailored interventions which take into consideration psychopathic persons' unique patterns of behavioral conditioning and predispositions may have the potential to reduce violence. However, equally important, certain interventions may potentially exacerbate these persons' violent behavior. The nature of the outcomes is likely highly dependent on the specific components of the intervention itself. We conclude that future research should increase methodological rigor by striving to include treatment control groups and increasing the transparency of the implemented interventions.     

Stability of the Million Adolescent Personality Inventory in an Incarcerated Delinquent Population

Clinical use of the Millon Adolescent Personality Inventory (MAPI) depends on computerized interpretation of the pattern of scale score elevations in the profile beyond certain cutoff scores rather than the elevations of single scales. There has been no reported work on the stability of the scale scores or the stability of the 2-point codes in a delinquent population. The MAPI was administered to 46 incarcerated male juvenile delinquents and was readministered after a period of 2 to 4 weeks. The test-retest correlations of the base-rate scale scores ranged from .33 to .89 with a mean of .74, which compare favorably to Millon's (1982) standardization sample. However, only 41% of the 2-point codes were judged to be congruent between administrations. The poor congruence of the 2-point codes across administrations raises doubts about interpretive statements based on these codes.     

Unprovoked aggression: effects of psychopathic traits and sadism

Psychopathic individuals engage in the most violent and cold-blooded acts of aggression. In the laboratory, psychopathy traits have been linked to the commission of unprovoked aggression. The purpose of this study was to assess affective motives that may underlie the relationship between psychopathy and unprovoked aggression. One hundred thirty-seven men viewed a series of photographs depicting violent imagery, completed a lexical decision task designed to assess state affect, and competed in a laboratory-based aggression paradigm. Results indicated that participants who responded faster to happiness words after viewing violent imagery (i.e., sadistic) were significantly more likely to engage in unprovoked aggression. Additionally, Factor 1 psychopathy (emotional detachment) predicted increased probability of unprovoked aggression; however, this relationship was not mediated by sadism. Rather, Factor 1 and sadism each independently predicted unprovoked aggression. The implications of the present data suggest that the type of violence evinced may inform the risk for perpetration of future acts. That is, the individual who demonstrates unprovoked violence may be more likely to employ aggressive tactics across situational contexts than the individual who demonstrates only impulsive acts of hostile/reactive aggression.     

Antisocial personality disorder and psychopathy: diagnostic dilemmas in classifying patterns of antisocial behavior in sentencing evaluations

Antisocial Personality Disorder (APD) and PCL-R psychopathy are critically examined regarding their application to sentencing determinations. PCL-R psychopathy is emerging in the literature as a more useful forensic diagnostic construct than APD, which appears flawed by multiple weaknesses. These include shifting diagnostic criteria, innumeracy problems, absence of symptom weighting, temporal instability, and the equivalence of some symptoms with substance abuse disorders. Additionally, APD overdiagnosis may result from inattention to issues of social context, trauma history, and symptom pervasiveness. Neither objective nor projective personality testing reliably differentiates APD. Finally, an APD diagnosis does not always indicate criminal, much less incorrigible criminal behavior. By contrast, PCL-R psychopathy results are strongly predictive of criminal behavior and violent recidivism for Caucasian males through mid-life residing in the community. Emerging research with the PCL-R regarding other important populations and contexts is promising but generalization is currently limited. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Integrating base rate data in violence risk assessments at capital sentencing

Prediction of violence in capital sentencing has been controversial. In the absence of a scientific basis for risk assessment, mental health professionals offering opinions in the capital sentencing context are prone to errors. Actuarial or group statistical data, known as base rates, have proven far superior to other methods for reducing predictive errors in many contexts, including risk assessment. Actuarial follow-up data on violent recidivism of capital murderers in prison and post release have been compiled and analyzed to demonstrate available base rates for use by mental health experts conducting risk assessments pertaining to capital sentencing. This paper also reviews various methods for individualizing the application of base rates to specific cases. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Reciprocity and Reasonable Disagreement: From Liberal to Democratic Legitimacy

At the center of Rawls’s work post-1980 is the question of how legitimate coercive state action is possible in a liberal democracy under conditions of reasonable disagreement. And at the heart of Rawls’s answer to this question is his liberal principle of legitimacy. In this paper I argue that once we attend carefully to the depth and range of reasonable disagreement, Rawls’s liberal principle of legitimacy turns out to be either wildly utopian or simply toothless, depending on how one reads the ideal of reciprocity it is meant to embody. To remedy this defect in Rawls’s theory, I␣undertake to develop the outlines of a democratic conception of legitimacy, drawing first on Rawls’s generic conception of legitimacy in The Law of Peoples and second on a revised understanding of reciprocity between free and equal citizens. On this revised understanding, what free and equal citizens owe one another is not reciprocity in judgment, but reciprocity of interests. David A. Reidy, J.D. (Indiana University-Bloomington), Ph.D. (Philosophy, University of Kansas) is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Tennessee. He works in political philosophy and philosophy of law. He has published essays in journals such as Political Theory, Journal of Social Philosophy, Res Publica, Southern Journal of Philosophy, Public Affairs Quarterly, Polis, Journal of Value Inquiry, Kantian Review, Economics and Philosophy, Legal Studies Forum, as well as in various anthologies. He is the co-editor (with Mortimer Sellers) of Universal Human Rights: Moral Order in a Divided World (Rowman and Littlefield, 2005) and (with Rex Martin) of A Realistic Utopia: Essays on Rawls’s ‘The Law of Peoples’ (Blackwell, forthcoming 2005).     

Relationship of pain tolerance with human aggression

In research with animals as well as samples of chronic pain patients and elderly persons, pain has been positively correlated with measures of irritability, hostility, and aggression. The present investigation examined the relationship of pain tolerance with aggression. 72 men participated in the Response Choice Aggression Paradigm, described previously by Zeichner and colleagues, in which aggressive response to provocation was possible but not required of participants. Subjective pain tolerance, defined as maximal electrical shock willingly tolerated by participants, was assessed. Significant but small Pearson product-moment correlations between pain tolerance and aggression ranged between .21 and .32, with the largest accounting for 9% of variance.     

Narcissism and unprovoked aggression

It is widely accepted that narcissists become aggressive when they experience ego‐threat. However, there is surprisingly little empirical research on the relationship between narcissism and aggression. Equivocal findings suggest that aggression in narcissists either occurs only in response to provocation, or regardless of provocation. One‐hundred and thirty‐seven collegiate men completed the Narcissistic Personality Inventory followed by a sham aggression paradigm, which afforded them the opportunity shock, or refrain entirely from shocking an ostensible opponent confederate. Participants were identified as “unprovoked aggressors,” “retaliatory aggressors,” or “nonaggressors” contingent on when and if they chose to administer electrical shocks to the confederate. Results indicated that participants who were high on narcissistic traits were more likely to be unprovoked aggressors than their low narcissism counterparts. Results are discussed in relation to threatened egotism theory and call for more research on narcissism, aggression, and the moderating effect of provocation. Aggr. Behav. 36:414–422, 2010. © 2010 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.