400 Forensic Psychology
issues). At the level of ethical guidelines and professional
responsibilities, the broadest definition of “forensic psychol-
ogy” applies best. Any psychologist (e.g., clinical, social,
cognitive, developmental) who works within the legal system
should be held to the same high ethical and professional stan-
dards that are presented in the APA Code of Ethics and the
AP-LSSpecialty Guidelines. But the clinical/nonclinical dis-
tinction is still a meaningful one. For example, education,
training, and licensing issues that are pertinent to clinical
forensic psychologists may be irrelevant or inapplicable to
nonclinical forensic psychologists (e.g., a one-year clinical
internship). Further, clinicians and nonclincians differ in their
orientation to the legal process and in the role they are likely
to play in the courtroom. Clinicians are more likely to present
assessments of specific individuals, while nonclinicians are
more likely to present research-based social-fact evidence
that applies to people in general.
Forensic Clinical Evaluations
Today many psychologists are employed full-time or part-
time to provide clinical evaluations to courts and attorneys in
addressing forensic issues. These evaluations are requested in
criminal cases (e.g., competence to stand trial, insanity, sen-
tencing), civil cases (e.g., disability claims, civil commit-
ment, competence to consent to treatment, personal injury),
and cases before juvenile, child and family, and probate
courts (e.g., child abuse and neglect, parental competence, di-
vorce custody, and various issues in delinquency cases).
The earliest involvement of psychologists in forensic clini-
cal evaluations for courts, at least in significant numbers, was
with regard to child and family cases that were before the
courts. When the American system of juvenile justice began in
the early 1900s, the original juvenile courts had court clinics at-
tached to them to serve judges in understanding youths’ needs.
The earliest of these clinics was an institute developed in 1909
by William Healy, a neurologist, and Grace Fernald, a psychol-
ogist, to serve the Cook County (Chicago) Juvenile Court
(Schetky & Benedek, 1992). Using a team approach, they pro-
vided comprehensive, multidisciplinary “studies” of youths to
assist the court in arriving at rehabilitation plans. Psycholo-
gists’ evaluation services to juvenile courts have continued rel-
atively unabated to the present time. In the latter half of the
twentieth century, psychologists have been the most frequent
professional providers of evaluations for disposition recom-
mendations and transfer to criminal court in delinquency cases,
as well as parental capacities in divorce custody cases.
The evolution of clinical psychology in the mid-twentieth
century brought many psychologists in contact with criminal
populations through their employment in correctional pro-
grams (Brodsky, 1973). In addition, in their clinical roles in
forensic inpatient hospitals, they began to perform psycho-
logical testing in forensic evaluation cases under the auspices
of psychiatry. At least by the 1960s, some attorneys and
courts were increasingly recognizing psychologists’ potential
as evaluation experts in criminal and civil cases. In Jenkins v.
United States(1962), the Supreme Court decided that a psy-
chologists’ testimony should not be excluded as evidence re-
garding mental illness in cases involving competence to stand
trial. The issue, the Court said, was not the individual’s degree,
but whether the person had adequate training and experience
to form an expert opinion. This ruling opened the way for psy-
chologists to step into that role as independent examiners.
This opportunity was seized by the founders of the
American Psychology-Law Society (AP-LS), most of whom
had primary interests in promoting forensic psychology as an
evaluation resource for attorneys and courts (Grisso, 1991).
No sooner had the group of 101 charter members convened,
however, than they found that they were radically divided in
their views of psychology’s future as providers of forensic
evaluations. The majority felt that psychology’s empirical
foundation and tradition of psychological testing offered the
courts much more than did psychiatry and that psychologists
should forge ahead in their efforts to provide evaluations for
the courts. But a vocal minority (including the first president
of the AP-LS, Jay Ziskin) urged restraint until the field could
perform some research to support psychological experts’
testimony. These dissenters pointed out that psychologists
knew no more about the validity of their opinions—for
example, about predictions of dangerousness or mental states
related to criminal responsibility—than did clinicians in any
other mental health profession (Grisso, 1991).
The more conservative minority was correct. At that time,
only one major research study had been conducted on the
evaluation of competence to stand trial (directed not by a psy-
chologist, but a psychiatrist) (Laboratory for Community
Psychiatry, 1973). There was no standard way to perform an
evaluation for competence to stand trial, and the quality of
most such evaluations in must states was woefully inade-
quate by today’s standards. By the mid-1970s data were
beginning to appear that indicated that when mental health
professionals predicted that someone was going to engage in
a violent behavior, they were wrong two out of three times
(Monahan, 1981). Psychological and psychiatric analysis
of the definition and assessment of criminal responsibility
(insanity) offered no particular advances beyond those that
could be found in medical treatises of the nineteenth century
(Quen, 1994). And until the 1980s, the field had not a single
textbook on forensic psychology, much less a textbook on the
performance of specific forensic clinical evaluations.