Fitness to Plead: A Conceptual and Empirical Study
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Fitness to Plead: A Conceptual and Empirical Study
IRAS ID
142484
Contact name
Penelope Brown
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
King's College London
Research summary
The right to a fair trial is a fundamental human right. For a trial to be fair the defendant must be “fit to plead”. This is
currently defined by the “Pritchard Test” which considers whether the defendant can understand the charges, enter a
plea, instruct a lawyer and follow proceedings. When someone is unfit to plead, often due to mental disorder, they are
not tried but diverted from the criminal justice system e.g. sent to hospital for treatment.
The Prichard test dates back to 1836 and is badly in need of reform. It is not uptodate
with modern legal or psychiatric
thinking and there are concerns that many vulnerable people are tried unfairly. In 2010, the Law Commission
published a consultation paper which criticised the test and outlined a new approach. They argued that the test
should focus on the defendant’s decisionmaking
capacity, and called for a standardised psychiatric instrument to
support legal professionals in determining unfitness to plead.
The aim of this project is to answer that call. It comprises:
1. a quantitative study of targeted populations in the criminal justice system using a videobased
clinical instrument for
assessing fitness to plead (FTPtool)
;
2. a followup
qualitative study to probe the decisionmaking
capacity of selected defendants;
3. focus groups with judges and other professionals, using vignettes drawn from the study, to seek expert consensus
on the determination of fitness.
The purpose of this threestage
approach is to test and refine the videobased
assessment instrument, comparing its
results with the “gold standard” of judicial opinion, and generating suggested ‘cut off’ scores to define and estimate
the prevalence of ‘unfitness’. In addition, the study will generate “good practice” guidelines for conducting fitness
assessments, while also providing empirically robust data about risk factors.
A62.REC name
London - South East Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
14/LO/0832
Date of REC Opinion
1 Jul 2014
REC opinion
Unfavourable Opinion