UNSAFE PASSAGE Predicting Dangerousness?

At the 1994 sentencing of a convicted child killer to life in prison, Winnipeg Associate Chief Justice Oliphant quoted a report written long before the crime by the Director of Forensic Psychiatry for the Province of Manitoba. In 1989, predicting the dangerousness of the defendant, the director had written: “There is nothing to indicate that he is an antisocial individual and he is not prone to expressions of aggression or violence … I do not feel that he represents a physical threat to … the community in general … he is not, in my opinion, a dangerous person.”

After reading this aloud in his court, Justice Oliphant adjudicated, “My comment, having read this, and viewing what has transpired since, is that psychiatry can certainly not be described as a science.” [Emphasis added].

In the courtroom, case after case proves the inability of psychiatrists to predict the acts of criminals.

In a 1976 article in the Rutgers Law Review, authors Henry Steadman and Joseph Cocozza concluded, “There is no empirical evidence to support the position that psychiatrists have any special expertise in accurately predicting dangerousness.”

With twenty more years of research to draw from, Terrence Campbell wrote in a 1994 article in the Michigan Bar Journal, “The accuracy with which clinical judgment predicts future events is often little better than random chance. The
accumulated research literature indicates that errors in predicting dangerousness range from 54% to 94%, averaging about 85%.”

An American Psychiatric Association task force admitted as much in its 1979 Amicus Curiae Brief to the U.S. Supreme Court, in which it stated, “It has been noted that ‘dangerousness’ is neither a psychiatric nor a medical diagnosis, but involves issues of legal judgment and definition, as well as issues of social policy. Psychiatric expertise in the prediction of ‘dangerousness’ is not established and clinicians should avoid ‘conclusory judgments in this regard.’”

In response, the Supreme Court rendered the opinion that, “the professional literature uniformly establishes that such predictions are fundamentally of very low reliability, and that psychiatric testimony and expertise are irrelevant to such predictions. In view of these findings, psychiatric testimony on the issue of future criminal behavior only distorts the fact-finding process.”

In 2002, Kimio Moriyama, vice president of the Japanese Psychiatric Association further admitted, “… [I]t is impossible for [psychiatric] science to tell whether someone has a high potential to repeat an offense.”

Despite such admissions, the concept of “dangerousness” is still used in courts and during involuntary commitment procedures of so-called “mental patients.”

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