Introducing the BCAT: A Tool to Aid Treatment Providers in Assessing Adjudicative Competence

Abstract

The most frequently requested forensic evaluations are to assess a defendant's competency to proceed, yet inefficiencies in the competency review process often lead to wasted state resources and prolonged detainment. When a judge identifies a defendant as incompetent, criminal proceedings are postponed and the defendant is typically ordered to receive competency restoration treatment. The court also schedules a hearing to review the defendant’s progress toward competency and orders a competency examiner to prepare a progress report for that hearing. If the court then determines the defendant is competent their case will proceed, otherwise the court will generally order that competency restoration treatment continue. These competency examinations and their associated court hearings typically occur in standard intervals, such as every three months. It is common for defendants to be restored to competency prior to their next scheduled court hearing, but competency examiners and courts are often not apprised of this development. This is partially due to dynamics associated with treatment providers. Though treatment providers such as psychiatrists and clinical social workers are trained in mental health issues, they are not typically trained to determine if a defendant is competent. Consequently, they may inadvertently continue to provide daily competency restoration treatment to a defendant who has already been restored to competency. Such occurrences contribute to a waste of resources, unnecessarily long detainment for competency restoration treatment, and an unnecessarily long postponement of legal proceedings. This study examines whether the Bartlett Competency Assessment Tool (BCAT) could be utilized by treatment providers to assist them in determining if a defendant is likely competent to proceed and thus ready for a formal competency examination. The recommendation of the BCAT was compared to the recommendation of formal competency examinations for 27 defendants and accurately predicted the outcome of the examinations in 25 cases, or 92 percent of the time (96 percent of the time if situations with feigned symptoms are excluded). Implications and limitations of these findings are discussed, including the potential of the BCAT to help states better utilize resources and reduce unnecessary treatment and detainment.