Public Evaluations of Unrepresented Defendants

Previous articles have addressed the ethical and legal issues involved when private psychiatrists perform forensic evaluations on criminal defendants before the defendants have access to counsel; but there have been few studies ad-dressing evaluations requested through public facilities and by clinicians other than psychiatrists. The authors present the results of a detailed study of defen-dants admitted for evaluations of competency to proceed to a forensic inpatient unit in one state, as well as data from a national survey of state forensic facilities. The studies were designed to measure the incidence of unrepresented defen-dants in a population referred for competency evaluation, as well as to examine the reasons for such occurrences. The data reveal that court-ordered evaluations of unrepresented defendants are rare, but continue to exist. Both organized psychiatry and psychol-ogy in the United States have made it ex-plicit that forensic evaluation of an adult criminal defendant before that person has access to representation by counsel is un-ethical. As far back as 1981, the America