Forensic Psychology: Limitation of Forensic Assessments

INTRODUCTION From time immemorial, man has been fascinated with behavioral deviations from the normative particularly in the context of crime, or more generally, morality. In fact, classical playwrights and novelists such as Shakespeare and Dostoevsky owe their literary success to their incredible ability to glare into socially and morally deviant minds and weave stories around them. We see a similar trend today. Much of primetime television is filled with shows that have experienced psychoanalysts chasing sophisticated and grossly deviant criminals or some variation of this general theme. The general public tends to relate to the job of a forensic psychologists to that of a cat chasing a mouse. Forensic psychology, however, is a far less glamorous and far more complex endeavor. It is defined loosely as the "intersection between Psychology and the legal system". More specifically, forensic psychologists are required to evaluate the competency of a subject to stand trial, to examine a subject's present state of sanity and his/her state of sanity at the time of the crime, to predict whether a subject has behavioral inclinations to commit the crime again (which is important for length and type of sentencing) and, if a criminal is convicted, to develop rehabilitation programs to measure the progress of rehabilitation in general. Forensic psychology also includes the behavior and emotional state of victims as well. One might, for example, need to establish psychologically whether a child has been sexually abused or not. Even jury selection and eyewitness identification all fall under the purview of forensic psychology. As vast a field as it already is, forensic psychology is fast growing as the importance of a behavioral approach to crime and the legal system is being realized.
Forensic psychologists are often engaged professionally in the legal system as 'expert witnesses', witnesses who are considered to have knowledge outside the range of the general public. Hence,

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