Feigning incompetency to stand trial: An investigation of the Georgia Court Competency Test.

Abstract

The Georgia Court Competency Test (GCCT;Wildman et al., 1980).One major advance in forensic psychology is the development of specific instruments that are designed to measure psycholegal constructs (Grisso, 1986) with the most fruitful research focused on competency to stand trial (Nicholson, Robertson, Johnson, & Jensen, 1988). The first efforts at the standardization emerged from Laboratory of Community Psychiatry (McGarry, 1973) in the form of Competency Screening Test (CST), a 22-sentence completion task addressing the trial and relationship with attorney, and the Competency Assessment Instrument (CAI), a rating system of impairment on 13 court-related functions. Several additional competency to stand trial instruments have subsequently been developed, including the GCCT, the Fitness Interview Test (FIT; Roesch, Webster, & Eaves, 1984), Interdisciplinary Fitness Interview (IFI; Golding, Roesch, & Schreiber, 1984), and most recently the Computer-Assisted Determination of Competency to Proceed (CADCOMP; Barnard et al., 1991).The original GCCT was composed of 17 questions that addressed the following domains: knowledge of the courtroom and legal proceedings, current charges and possible penalties, and relationship with an attorney. The GCCT was subsequently revised by Johnson and Mullett (1987) with a total of 21 questions, organized by the same domains. The revised GCCT (see Nicholson, Briggs, & Robertson, 1988) appears to have excellent interrater reliability and is composed of three dimensions: General Legal Knowledge, Courtroom Layout, and Specific Legal Knowledge. In addition, reported an excellent hit rate (81.8%) between the GCCT and independent recommendations by experienced forensic clinicians.The GCCT is distinguished from other competency measures by evidence of a stable factor structure. Bagby, Nicholson, Rogers, and Nussbaum (1992) performed a congruence analysis on 140 defendants from the study and 311 additional defendants from a Canadian study. The data offered some support for a stable three-factor solution. Factor 1 (General Legal Knowledge) yielded three unique and replicated loadings that addressed tasks/responsibilities of the judge, defense counsel, and audience. Factor 2 (Courtroom Layout) yielded three such loadings that involved the visual identification of where the judge, prosecutor, and audience are placed in the typical courtroom. Factor 3 (Specific Legal Knowledge) yielded two such loadings that focused on the defense counsel's name and a method of contacting him or her. The first two dimensions of competency appear to relate to the Dusky standard specification that the defendant has "a rational as well as factual understanding of the proceedings against him" (American Bar Association, 1989, p. 162). The other specification of Dusky is that the defendant has "sufficient present ability to consult with his lawyer and with reasonable degree of rational understanding" (American Bar Association, 1989, p. 162). Although the knowledge of counsel (name and contact method

Fitness to plead and competence to stand trial: a systematic review of the constructs and their application

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An Investigation of the ECST-R in Male Pretrial Patients

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The meaning of malingering data: further applications of Bayes' theorem

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