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Forensic assessments must always consider whether examinees are putting forth genuine effort or seeking to feign legally relevant incapacities. Miranda abilities are no exception when a putatively invalid Miranda waiver might result in the full suppression of an outright confession. Using a within-subjects simulation design, jail detainees were administered a representative Miranda warning and two Standardized Assessment of Miranda Abilities (SAMA) measures: Miranda Vocabulary Scale and Miranda Quiz. As expected, detainees have no difficulty in feigning severe deficits in their recall of the Miranda warning and portraying markedly impaired abilities on both SAMA measures. However, using floor-effect detection strategies, several feigning indicators proved effective at identifying likely feigned Miranda abilities. As an ancillary issue, the Inventory of Legal Knowledge was found to be very effective using both the traditional and revised scoring.

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Each year, thousands of juveniles in custody waive their Miranda rights and promptly provide self-incriminations without the benefit of counsel. Defense attorneys and other members of the court often remain simply unaware of how many of these pivotal waiver decisions are effectuated. This translational article seeks to illuminate for lawyers and the general public how legally involved juveniles may provide potentially invalid Miranda waivers because of false beliefs plus an inability to intelligently weigh their options while considering the concomitant consequences. An extensive reanalysis of Miranda reasoning was performed for 245 legally involved juveniles using a mock crime scenario. In explaining their Miranda waiver decisions, these juveniles often considered both favorable and unfavorable outcomes associated with their decisions. For instance, many believed that exercising their right to remain silent would signal their guilt to the investigating officers. As a critically important finding, juveniles who focused primarily on short-term reasons (e.g., pleasing persons in authority) were more than 12 times more likely to waive their rights and subsequently confess than those exhibiting more balanced reasoning. These findings are discussed within the context of juvenile criminal justice and the increasingly proactive role of defense attorneys in ensuring that juvenile Miranda waivers represent knowing and intelligent waivers.

The movement to implement threat assessment (TA) units first requires the implementation of evidence-based assessment. This study examined the initial psychometric data for the North Carolina BeTA Investigation Overview (NCBIO-25), a multidisciplinary teamadministered structured professional judgment measure for Behavioral Threat Assessment in a law enforcement setting. The measure was used with a sample of 64 persons of concern for whom a TA was requested and performed. The results indicated that high interrater reliability could be achieved in raters trained in TA. In addition, initial factorial validity indicated a five-factor model with correlated latent variables appeared to be the best representation of the observed data. These results suggest that the NCBIO-25 is a promising new tool to aid law enforcement TA teams in conducting TA investigations and developing plans for risk management. Public Significance StatementOperational decision-making in the threat assessment process is enhanced by the use of reliable and valid measures. This study provides initial psychometric information on a structured professional judgment tool that can aid case decision-making in law enforcement settings that work threat cases across multiple settings and with multiple potential targets of interest. The findings of this study will directly benefit threat assessment units within law enforcement settings in public sector settings who wish to have a free for use, empirically based, systematic structure for capturing behavioral evidence to conduct a threat assessment.