Synonyms
Competency to proceed
Definition
Otherwise referred to as “competency to proceed,” this term refers to a criminal defendant’s capacity to participate effectively and make decisions on his or her own legal behalf while being prosecuted. It is to be distinguished from legal sanity because it has a very different legal standard. Furthermore, competency most commonly deals with current mental states (at the time of the proceedings), whereas insanity deals with the mental state (mens rea) at the time the offense(s) were committed. Competency to proceed is relevant to any portion of the process, from talking to police (i.e., Miranda rights to remain silent) to plead guilty, receive a sentence, waive one’s right to counsel, and even being executed.
The rationale for questioning/examining a defendant’s competency can be traced back to English common law and the seventeenth century. In Dusky v United States (1960), the US Supreme Court upheld the right of a criminal defendant to be...
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References and Readings
Dusky v. U.S. (1960). 362 US 402.
Estelle v. Smith, 451 U.S. 454 (1981).
Marcopulos, B. A., Morgan, J. E., & Denney, R. L. (2008). Neuropsychological evaluation of competency to proceed. In R. Denney & J. Sullivan (Eds.), Clinical neuropsychology in the criminal forensic setting. New York: Guilford Press.
Poythress, N. G., Nicholson, R., Otto, R. K., et al. (1999). The MacArthur competence assessment tool-criminal adjudication (MacCat-CA). Odessa: Psychological Assessment Resources.
Zapf, P. A., & Roesch, R. (2009). Evaluation of competence to stand trial. New York: Oxford University Press.
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Heilbronner, R.L. (2018). Legal Competency. In: Kreutzer, J.S., DeLuca, J., Caplan, B. (eds) Encyclopedia of Clinical Neuropsychology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57111-9_1429
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