&gal and Criminolcgical P y c h l o ~(1996), 1, 3-16 prinrd in Gnat Bitah 3

0 1996 The British Psychological Society

What i s forensic psychology?*

Ronald Blackburnt
Uniuersig oflivcrpool
and
Ashworth Hoqital, Parkbourn, Maghu4 Merseysih L3 1 1H K UK

Increased involvement of psychologists with legal processes and products has resulted
in an indiscriminate use of the term ‘forensic psychology’. It is argued that forensic
psychology denotes the provision of psychological information to facilitate legal
decisions rather than a particular form of psychological knowledge or skill. This is a
specialized function that can be exercised by any psychologist with expertise
appropriate to a legal question and goes beyond clinical o r criminal issues. It is also
an activity undertaken for the agents of law. Stricter delineation of forensic
psychology is needed to clarify the professional and ethical obligations of
psychologists who offer services in legal contexts and to avoid misleading consumers.

The growth in the number of forensic psychologists has been among the most
prominent developments in the burgeoning application of psychology to law during the
last two decades. This growth has been most apparent in the United States, where it
was largely a consequence of reforms in mental health law and an increased demand by
the courts for evidence from clinical psychologists. In Europe, there has been a parallel,
though less dramatic increase in the involvement of psychologists with legal processes,
and many clinical psychologists in Britain whose work centres on the mentally
dsordered offender now describe themselves as ‘forensic clinical psychologists’. This is
a title virtually unheard of 20 years ago. However, given significant differences between
national legal systems and in the extent to which they involve psychologists, it seems
appropriate to enquire whether we are witnessing the development of a unified area of
professional interest. This paper therefore considers the nature of forensic psychology
as applied science and what skills its practitioners exercise.
There are several reasons why it may be timely to take stock of forensic psychology.
To begm with, it can now claim its first century. The first recorded instance of a
psychologist acting as an expert witness in a court of law was in 1896, when Albert
von Schrenk-Notzing testified at the trial of a Munich man accused of murdering three
women (Bartol & Bartol, 1987). Schrenk-Notzing was a product of the new discipline
of experimental psychology emerging in Germany following the setting up of the first
psychological laboratory by Wilhelm Wundt at Leipzig in 1879. He drew on research
on memory and suggestibility to argue that pre-trial publicity had led to ‘retroactive
memory falsification’ on the part of many witnesses, by which he meant that they
could not distinguish between what they witnessed and what had been reported in the
press. The accused was, however, convicted on firm evidence.
* Based on an inaugural lecture at the University of Liverpool, January 1995.
t Requests for reprints.
4 Ronald Bhckbum
Forensic psychology has also recently caught the eye of the media. Offender
profiling in particular has attracted attention, perhaps because it is typically associated
with sensational crimes. The old euphemism of someone helping the police with their
inquiries no longer means what it used to. Nowadays, that person may well be a
forensic psychologist! However, the public image of forensic psychology has been
somewhat clouded by fictional portrayals of offender profilers in recent television
series. In one of these, ‘Cracker’, the hero is a freelance clinical psychologist who
cajoles the police into letting him solve serious crimes for them, usually by a mixture
of common sense, hunch, and interrogation techniques which would certainly not be
taught on any recowzed clinical psychology programme. He is also a gambling, chain-
smoking, womanizing, drunken bully. Reactions of psychologists to the series have
ranged from outrage over the distortion of a professional role to speculation about the
identity of the model for this character.
If the public have a misleading image of forensic psychology, it is partly because
psychologists themselves seem uncertain about where the boundaries of forensic
psychology lie. In 1993, a vote of the membership of The British Psychological Society
approved the proposal that under the terms of the Society’s Royal Charter, members
of the Division of Criminological and Legal Psychology should be entitled to call
themselves Chartered Forensic Psychologists. This vote was taken after two decades
of debate on the question, which at times has been quite heated. Although apparently
in a minority, as I voted against the proposal, I am not alone in believing that the
society may have shot itself in the foot, and that members adopting this title risk
compromising their code of professional conduct. The Division was established in
1977, and membership is open to psychologists with demonstrable experience in
settings related to the administration of civil and criminal justice. In practice, this
means mainly applied psychologists in the prison service and clinical psychologists in
the special hospitals or the developing Regional Forensic Psychiatric Services, but it
includes clinical and educational psychologists whose clients may be involved in legal
proceedings, and academics engaged in teaching and research in various aspects of
psychology and law. To apply the title of forensic psychologist to this heterogeneous
group throws into sharp relief the question of what is forensic psychology.
This decision, in my view, reflects narrow sectional interests and a premature rush to
professionahation which is a disservice to psychology as a discipline. In particular, it
ties forensic psychology too closely to criminal and clinical matters and may foreclose a
dialogue between psychology and law about the legal issues which psychology might
help to resolve. What I wish to stress here is that forensic psychology is not a particular
kind of psychology. Rather is it the application of psychology to a particular purpose.
There is actually little disagreement about the central meaning of ‘forensic’. As the
dictionaries tell us, the term comes from the Latinforensis, meaning of the forum, the
Roman place of assembly for judicial and other public business. Its established English
meaning is hence ‘pertaining to or used in courts of law’, and t h i s is how it has been
understood by the public in general and lawyers in particular. Forensic experts,
whatever their discipline, are those who can contribute evidence and argument derived
from their specialist knowledge to assist the courts in reaching legal decisions. Forensic
psychology in these terms is the application of psychological knowledge for the
purposes of the courts.
 what is forensic psychology? 5

Is any harm done by extending the description ‘forensic’ to include other activities
which impinge indirectly on the law or which arise as a consequence of legal decisions?
I believe that it is because it obfuscates, and will confuse those it is intended to
enlighten. Lawyers accustomed to understanding forensic skills as the effective
presentation of legal argument will doubtless find puzzling the description of prisons
and secure psychiatric hospitals as ‘forensic settings’, and may well be wondering
whether the notion of ‘forensic care’ signifies the imminent introduction to the
courtroom of emergency medical teams to deal with judicial apoplexy! These terms
border on the incoherent. Tolerance for ambiguity is often regarded as a hallmark of
psychological health, but raises suspicions of vacuous thinking in the area of scientific
applications.
This is not a pedantic argument about dictionary definitions, because the issues
centre on roles, skills and professional allegiances. I will argue that forensic
psychological practices are not simply those which are vaguely connected with the law.
They are activities undertaken for the law. This essential feature determines the
boundaries of forensic psychology, the skills needed by its practitioners, and its utility.
However, it also imposes constraints and ethical dilemmas, because the purposes of
the courts and of the law itself diverge significantly from the purposes of psychological
practitioners and researchers. Before taking this argument further, I will consider
briefly psychology’s involvement with the law.

Psychology and law

In the same year that Albert von Schrenk-Notzing delivered his testimony in a German
court, James McKeen Cattell of Columbia University in New York signalled the
interest of psychology in legal processes in research on the accuracy of recollection
subsequently published in the new journal Science (Cattell, 1897). He described a study
in which students were asked questions similar to those which might be asked in a
court of justice, for example, ‘what was the weather like a week ago today?’ While the
unreliability of eyewitness testimony in the courtroom was already accepted by many,
Cattell expressed surprise at the extent of inaccuracy of recall revealed by his results.
In answer to the weather question, for example, students described every kind of
weather conceivable for the time of year.
Again in the same year, Lightner Witmer, who is generally acknowledged to be the
father of clinical psychology, established the first psychological clinic for children. He
was already teaching courses on the psychology of crime at the University of
Pennsylvania (McReynolds, 1989, and his clinic appears to have influenced the
subsequent development of the Chicago Juvenile Psychopathic Institute, which was set
up to assess and treat delinquents by psychiatrist William Healy and clinical
psychologist Grace Fernald in 1909. All of these represent small beginnings, and it is
only in the last 20 years that these differing concerns have come together under the
umbrella of psychology and law. Broadly, this denotes all applications of psychological
theories, methods and findings to the legal system (LAsel, 1992).
Psychology and law is by no means a homogeneous area of applied psychology, but
the achievement of a degree of scientific autonomy is indicated by the formation of
psychology and law associations in most countries in which psychology has a
6 Ronald Blackbum
recogmzed academic and professional status. The Division of Criminological and Legal
Psychology in Britain is one example, and a significant development is the recent
founding of the European Association for Psychology and Law. The aim of these
associations is to enhance the scientific understanding of psychological aspects of the
functioning of the legal system, to investigate the validity of psychological assumptions
underlying material law, and to contribute in a technological sense to the operation of
the agencies of law, including the police and penal system, as well as the courts. It is
recognized that these represent disparate interests within psychology, but there are
three distinguishable strands.
First is the area ofpsycbolegal stMdies. The concern here is with behaviour within the
legal system as an arena of human interaction. Actors within this arena exhibit
discretion or choice. These include offender, victim, police, counsel, judge, jury, and
administrators of the penal system. All make critical decisions determined not simply
by the facts available, but also by contextual factors in the particular setting and their
personal biases and predilections. The frames of reference in which these decisions are
made are of central interest to psychology and other social sciences, because outcomes
in the system reflect the regular playing out of the complexities of human interaction
and decision making. Examples of research in this area include the reliabhty of
eyewitness testimony, which has now moved on to examine the conditions under
which errors of identification can be minimized (Wells, 1993), how legal and extra-legal
factors affect police-citizen encounters, what factors influence the decisions of judges,
and whether chddren can be reliable witnesses.
Criminological o r criminal psychology covers empirical research on the explanation of
crime, but overlaps with psycholegal studies in that behaviour of the police or crime-
related attitudes in the general population may be the target of interest. In its applied
aspects, it deals with treatment interventions with offenders, with crime prevention,
and with the functioning of penal institutions.
The h r d strand is that of e q e r t evidence. This covers the direct contribution of
psychologists to the law in which psychological findings are utilized as aids to legal
decision making, most clearly in the form of expert testimony to the courts. This
includes reporting the findings of psycholegal studies or the use of psychological
assessments with defendants, but may draw on the theories, methods and findings of
virtually any branch of psychology.
Another way of dfferentiating these diverse applications of psychology to law is the
distinction made by some between psychology in law, psychology and law, and the
psychology oflaw (Haney, 1980). Psychology in law denotes the use of psychology in
specific applications, such as testimony about witness reliability, the mental state of an
accused person, or parental fitness for child custody in divorce cases. Psychology and
the law is the study of the psychological aspects of the legal system investigated in
psycholegal studies. Psychology ofthe law concerns more abstract issues such as why
some laws are obeyed and others flouted, how children become socialized into legal
concepts, or attitudes of the public towards punishment.
I have not identified forensic psychology among these converging interests of legal
psychology because the term has been and continues to be used loosely to refer to
any or all of them, However, it has been applied most consistently to the direct
provision of psychological information to the courts, that is, to psychology in the law.
 What is forensic psychology? 7

I suggest that this is the only defensible use of the term, for two main reasons. First
is coherence. It should be apparent that psychology and law is heterogeneous and has
no well-defined scientific boundaries. To equate forensic psychology with the wider
field of psychology and law is to deprive the term of any functional significance.
Second, although forensic activities in this stricter sense take place witbin a legal
context, it is their function or purpose which distinguishes them. They are activities
undertaken for the law, the purpose being to answer a legal question. In contrast,
research on psychology and the law or ofthe law is typically undertaken either to test
psychological theories or because behaviour in legal contexts is of psychological
interest. It is therefore undertaken most specifically on behalf of the psychological
community.

Forensic psychology
DejninAforensic pycbology
Several authors have offered definitions of forensic psychology in recent years which
suggest that there is a consensually agreed meaning and which bring out its
distinpshing features:
(1) ‘That branch of applied psychology which is concerned with the collection,
examination and presentation of evidence for judicial purposes’ (Haward, 1981).
(2) (forensic psychologist) ‘. , . any psychologst who specialises in producing or
communicating psychologcal research or assessment information intended for
application to legal issues’ (Grisso, 1987).
(3) ‘All forms of professional psychological conduct when acting, with definable
foreknowledge, as a psychological expert on explicitly psycholegal issues, in direct
assistance to courts, parties to legal proceedmgs, correctional and forensic mental
health facilities, and administrative, judicial, and legislative agencies acting in an
adjudicative capacity’ (Committee on Ethical Guidelines for Forensic Psychologists,
1991).
(4) ‘The application of psychological theories, methods, and findings to the
administration of justice’ (Lcisel, 1992).
The first comes from a British psychologst, Lionel Haward, who pioneered the
application of psychology to legal questions in this country. It was, in fact, his
arguments which persuaded the Division of Criminological and Legal Psychology not
to call itself the Division of Forensic Psychology when it was founded nearly 20 years
ago. As he emphasizes, the forensic psychologist is always concerned with evidence
applied to a specific legal case. This does not necessarily mean appearing in court to
testify, because in only about 10 per cent of cases where a report is provided is the
psychologist called to speak to it in court. The second and third definitions come from
America, the fourth from Germany, where, as Usel reminds us, forensic psychology
originated. The definition offered by Grisso (1987) is similar to that of Haward. The
detailed definition of the Committee on Ethical Guidelines for Forensic Psychologists
(1991) implies a somewhat wider application by including assistance to ‘correctional
and mental health facilities’ and other agencies acting ‘in an adjudicative capacity’, as
does the reference to the ‘administration of justice’ by Liisel. However, to the extent
8 Ronald Bhck bum
that bodes other than the courts have authority to decide legal issues (for example,
parole boards, Mental Health Review Tribunals, commissions of inquiry, and arguably
the police) these definitions do not strain the spirit of the first two.
The conception of forensic psychology central to these definitions is that it is the
provision ofpsychological infOrmationfOr the putpose 4facihating a legal decision. This has several
implications for what forensic psychology is and what it is not. I consider four critical
points.

Forensicpsychology is a function or role

First, it is not a specific branch of psychological knowledge comparable, for example
to social, developmental, or abnormal psychology. Psychologists with expertise in any
of these or other areas of psychology can exercise a forensic role if their knowledge
is relevant to some legal question. Similarly, although it is a branch of applied
psychology, it cuts across the traditional applied areas of clinical, educational, and
occupational psychology, because again, psychologists with skills in any of these areas
may provide evidence for legal purposes.
This point needs to be stressed because forensic psychology has become
overidentified with clinical psychology. Having said that, I should note that it is
probably currently the case that the majority of psychologists who assist the justice
system are practising clinical psychologists. One British survey in 1985, for example,
found that nearly three-quarters of psychologists who indicated that they had given
evidence for the courts or Mental Health Review Tribunals during the previous five
years were clinical psychologists (Gudjonsson, 1985). Nevertheless, it must not be
forgotten that many psychologists who provide expert evidence are experimental
psychologists whose expertise lies in the areas of perception and memory, or social
behaviour, and their number may be growing.
Forensic psychology, then, does not describe a particular form of knowledge. Rather
does it denote a funchon or role exercised by a variety of psychological experts. What
they have in common is the abdity to apply their particular skills to questions about
experience and behaviour of concern to legal decisions.

ForenJicpsychology is a professional specialism

Although the forensic role may be exercised by any psychologist with a relevant
psychological expertise, this is not itself sufficient to confer the title of forensic
psychologist. The American literature distinguishes between forensic psychologists as
Specaksts who regularly provide information for legal use, and occasional expert witnesses
who would not claim to be forensic experts. This is a sensitive point in Britain, where
the courts have been slower than their American counterparts to accept psychologists
as expert witnesses. As a consequence, providing legal evidence is a full-time
occupation for no more than a handful of psychologists.
As Haward points out, psychologists who spent all of their time on providing
information for the courts would rapidly lose the psychological expertise which
justified their admissibility as expert witness in the first place. He therefore argues that
both psychology as a profession and the ends of justice will be better served by the
 m a t is forensic psychology? 9

forensic psychologist being first and foremost a specialist in psychological matters.

One implication is that the title of forensic psychologist should be used judiciously,
and should indicate both the possession and regular exercise of forensic skills. A
register of accredited forensic experts would facditate this.

Forensicpyhology is applied to both triminal and civiljustice

Forensic psychology is not confined to providing information on criminal matters. The
earliest survey of the involvement of British psychologists in forensic work in 1965
indicated a predominance of contributions to the civil courts (Haward, 1981).
Educational psychologists, for example, have a long tradition of involvement in
questions of care and protection of children or child custody following divorce, while
clinical psychologists quite frequently provide evidence in cases of compensation
claims following industrial injury, road accidents or stressful trauma. Among the
earliest applications of psychology to law in the first decades of this century was the
use of findings from investigations of visual perception in trade disputes (Bartol &
Bartol, 1987), and similar applications of experimental psychology continue to be
reported.
There are many other issues in civil disputes whose outcome has depended
significantly on psychological findings. In this light, it is somewhat breathtaking to read
the assertion of some psychologists that forensic ‘. . . is generally taken to mean
working with offenders’ (e.g. Crighton, 1989). It is manifestly the case that the majority
of scientists accepted by the legal system as forensic experts do not work with
offenders. They include pathologists, biologsts, and chemists, whose closest contact
with a criminal may be a blood sample.
It is tempting to attribute this interpretation of ‘forensic’ as something to do with
‘criminal’ to ignorance, but this misuse has become rather widespread. Haward (1981)
suggests that this may have come about because the most common reference to
forensic experts has centred on forensic pathologists and scientists employed by the
Home Office forensic science laboratories whose work typically involves the provision
of expert evidence in criminal cases. It may also have not a little to do with the
development of forensic psychatry from its origins as a medical specialty concerned
almost exclusively with furnishing the courts with evidence on criminal responsibility
to one whose work now includes the statutory responsibility for the treatment of
mentally disordered offenders. Contrary to what some seem to believe, this neither
changes nor expands the meaning of ‘forensic’. The forensic expertise of forensic
psychiatrists continues to lie not in the psychiatric skills of diagnosing and treating
mental disorder associated with crime but in the application of those skills to assist
legal decisions, for example, whether the offender is treatable, or should be admitted
to or discharged from secure psychiatric facilities.

Wo is the client?
The communication of psychological information specifically for use by legal decision
makers raises critical issues about professional roles and allegiances. I have already
alluded to the difference between activities undertaken for the law and those directed
10 Ronald Blackbum
towards the scientific community. One consequence is that presentation of the
information in a forensic context calls for skills beyond those required by research or
clinical practice. Commenting on the state of forensic skills of American psychologists
more than 20 years ago, Brodsky & Robey (1973) distinguished the courtmom-oriented
and the courtmom-unfamifiar psychologist. The courtroom-unfamiliar psychologist
prepares a report as if for a clinical case conference, does not understand the
adversarial system or the role of expert witness, and is fearful, overtechnical, and
muddled on the witness stand. Such a psychologist subsequently gives lectures on the
unbridgeable gap between psychology and law!
Courtroom unfamiliarity is a soluble problem, but less easily resolved are issues
arising from the question of ‘who is the client?’ (Monahan, 1980). Codes of
professional conduct oblige psychologists to hold the interest and welfare of those in
receipt of their services at all times. For the forensic psychologist providing
information at the request of legal officials, the client is quite clearly the legal system,
and the psychologist is hence functioning as an agent of the state. This raises ethical
issues for any psychologist, but these become particularly acute for clinical
psychologsts when the information required has implications for a person’s liberty.
Clinical psychology shares with medicine a tradition in which service to the
individual needs of the patient is paramount. When a psychologist is called upon to
examine someone to provide information for legal purposes, this professional
commitment is formally suspended, because the primary allegiance must be to the legal
system. This is the case even if the psychologist has been in a professional relationship
with a defendant. The interests of a defendant and society may often be compatible,
but, as the American psychiatrist Seymour Halleck notes in this context, ‘. . . what is
good for the indwidual or what serves the needs of the individual may not be good
€or society . . . and what is bad for the individual may be quite good for society’
(Halleck, 1971).
Simdar etlucal problems arise when mental health professionals treat offenders
under mandate from the court, for example, when offenders receive psychiatric
probation orders or are detained on hospital orders under the Mental Health Act.
Here, the clinician functions as a double agent, being simultaneously helper and agent
of social control. As Halleck notes, attempts to resolve the conflict depend on political
beliefs about the relation between society and the individual. Most professionals
probably steer a path between the two extremes of individualism and collectivism. The
extreme individualist view, associated with Thomas Szasz, is that the helping
professions should always avoid involvement in coercive treatment. The extreme
collectivist view is that professional responsibilities are to society as a whole, and that
professional skills must be directed to resolving social problems. There is no ready
solution to this ethical dilemma, but at the very least, it must be recognized. One
pragmatic answer is to acknowledge that the individual and society are both clients,
but with differing priorities over time. This means that psychologists working with
offenders should be prepared to wear two hats, and make it explicit when the priority
is the problems of the offender and when it is the problems the offender causes for
others.
However, this conflict between helping and coercion is not confined to those whose
dents come from the criminal courts, and in fact, mentally disordered offenders in
 what is forensic psychology? 11

Britain make up less than 10 per cent of involuntary psychiatric patients. There is
therefore nothing specifically ‘forensic’ about clinical services for compulsorily
detained patients. The provision of clinical psychology services for offenders is clinicul
psychology, not forensic psychology. Like any other specialist application to a specific
client group, it generates a need for relevant treatment and assessment skills, but these
are clinical skills. Only when these skills are directed to a legal question do they dictate
a forensic role. Again, however, I would stress that clinical psychologists working with
other client groups, such as clinical neuropsychologists, may also take on this role.
The argument that psychologists who work with offenders can lay claim to the title
of forensic psychologist simply because much of their work is connected with the
courts is therefore unconvincing. This argument also betrays a lack of sensitivity to the
ethical conflict between working on behalf of the individual patient or client and
serving the purposes of the law. At worst, it implies an uncritical acceptance of the
extreme collectivist position that the interests of society have priority at all times. As
Halleck notes, tlvs is the road to coercive practices disguised as treatment. This
collectivist position is manifest in a tendency to define the problems of mentally
disordered offenders in terms of their offence. Treatment groups for sex offenders or
arsonists, for example, are increasingly popular in the forensic psychiatric services, but
there are worrying ethical problems in using the criminal law to define clinical
problems. People should not have to commit sexual offences to get psycholopal
treatment for sexual problems.

The practice of forensic psychology

What, then, is entailed in the practice of forensic psychology? Some flavour of the
questions put to forensic psychologists by lawyers is given by the following small
sample (Table 1). Some of these are taken from Professor Haward’s case book
(Haward, 1981), which is a mine of inventive investigation. Others reflect questions
which psychologists are called on to answer by lawyers quite regularly.
It will be noted that by no means all of these problems require the collection of
clinical or crime-related information. Haward (1981) argues that clinical psychologists
may be in the best position to develop the forensic role because questions of
psychological dysfunction arise in both criminal trials and civil disputes, and successful
contribution to these issues may generate a demand for more general applications of
psychology on which the clinician may draw. Whether this view can be sustained in
the face of increasing specialization withm psychology is arguable, but it remains the
case at present that lawyers learn about the potential utility of psychology for legal
issues as much from informal professional networks as from publicized psychological
expertise.
Haward distinguishes four broad functions of psychologists in attempting to answer
these forensic questions. As an experimenter, the psychologist may summarize research
findings from experimental or survey research, or may conduct a laboratory or field
study to demonstrate the likelihood of some effect, such as the contribution of
psychological factors to an accident. As a clinician, the psychologist employs clinical
assessment methods usually to establish some aspect of psychological ability, disability,
capacity, or treatabllity. As uihaty, the psychologist draws on published data to
12 Ronald Bhckbum
Table 1. Examples of questions asked in forensic psychology

To what extent is the plaintiff mentally handicapped, and is this relevant to his road accident?
Is the confession made by the accused likely to be genuine?
What evidence can be offered to demonstrate the unreliability of an uncorroborated statement
by a police officer ?
Is there evidence that this detained patient no longer suffers from psychopathic disorder?
Did the plaintiff suffer brain damage? If so, to what extent has this affected his earning
capacity ?
Is there a treatment plan for this sex offender which could be carried out during a noncustodial
sentence ?
Is the appellant a fit person to have the custody of his child returned to him?
Are there any psychological factors relevant to the prisoner which would justify bail?
What evidence is there that the accident arose from a genuine machinery hazard and not from
carelessness?
Is this mentally impaired offender treatable ?

establish the probability of some occurrence, such as observing a critical event given
lighting conditions obtaining at the time. Finally, as adviser, the psychologist may assist
counsel without appearing as a witness, for example by observing the psychological
characteristics of witnesses. This latter role is often exercised in American courts in
the selection of jury members.
These functions may be exercised prior to a trial, during a trial, or at the sentencing
stage, although the most regular forensic psychological function is probably the
provision of clinical evidence during criminal trials, appeals, or tribunals. However, the
admissibility of psychological evidence in court has been hard won, and is by no means
guaranteed. For a long time, judges took the view that mental abnormality was a
dlsease, and that only medlcal practitioners were qualified to present expert testimony
on this issue, thereby limiting the potential contribution of clinical psychologists. In
the United States, this view was reversed in 1962, when the Court of Appeals for the
District of Columbia gave conditional support for the acceptance of psychologists as
experts on the issue of mental dhess. This position has not been universally adopted
in English courts, but in recent years, the courts have in practice become amenable to
psychological testimony on mental disorder, particularly in cases of mental handicap,
brain injury, sexual deviation, and at least in the case of Mental Health Review
Tribunals, psychopathic personality.
It has to be noted that involvement with the courts is not without its professional
costs. In the adversarial system of Anglo-American courts, the concern is not to
establish truth but rather to discover whether the prosecution case can be proved
beyond reasonable doubt. One consequence is that psychologists appearing as expert
witnesses must expect hostile cross-examination which seeks to discredit not only
psychological methods of evaluation, but also the competence of the psychologist, and
even the scientific credibllity of the discipline. Another is that psychologists have for
some time been required to appear in cases in which another psychologist is called by
opposing counsel with a view to discrediting the psychological evidence. The loss of
forensic psychology’s innocence became apparent during the 1980s when some
 What is forensic psychology? 13

American psychologists began to train lawyers in how to discredit the expert testimony
of clinical psychologists and psychiatrists. This emphasis on partiality, however, does
not fit easily with the scientific traditions of psychology.
Judicial rules which govern the nature of evidence also impose constraints which
psychologsts find irksome. The hearsay rule, for example, is intended to protect a
defendant from unfair or unsafe evidence by excluding testimony not directly obtained
by the witness on the grounds that the person obtaining the evidence cannot be
cross-examined. The rule is not applied consistently, but has been used to the
advantage of psychologists in turf battles with psychiatrists over the incorporation of
psychological evidence into psychiatric reports. However, Haward describes one
occasion on which the hearsay rule was invoked to exclude a report of findings from
a psychological study on the grounds that the subjects of the research could not be
present to testify!
Another rule restricts the admissibility of expert evidence about normal behaviour.
For example, evidence on the effects of stress or particular situations on a mentally ill
or mentally handicapped person are generally admitted, but similar effects on a person
free from mental disorder are not. The legal argument is that expert evidence relates
to subject matter beyond the common understanding of the average juror. Behaviour
within the limits of normality, however, is not outside the experience and knowledge
of the judge and jury, and is not therefore a subject for expert testimony. This has
excluded much of the body of psychological knowledge as inadmissible in British
courts, although a recent Court of Appeal judgement may herald a relaxation of this
rule (Colman & Mackay, 1995). Understanding and working effectively with these rules
and the language of the legal system are the critical core skills which forensic
psychologists must acquire.

The utility offorensicpsychology

An overview of forensic psychology would be incomplete without a critical
consideration of the utility of the enterprise. The increased willingness of the law to
seek the assistance of psychology suggests that psychologists are successfully serving
the interests of justice. However, the criteria of success in the justice system are not
simply about clarifying legal questions, they also have much to do with winning cases.
Acceptance of forensic psychology by consumers is not therefore sufficient to indicate
that psychology as it is applied in andfor the law meets the scientific and professional
standards of applied psychology. A number of psychologists argue that it does not,
and some go so far as to question the legitimacy of psychology’s involvement with the
courts. One American psychologist (Pachella, 1988) not only defends the judicial view
that matters of normal behaviour are within the competence of jurors, but argues for
the exclusion of all expert psychological testimony from criminal proceedings on the
grounds that psychologists’ knowledge of behaviour differs from that of the layperson
only in being more articulated, but not necessarily more extensive.
The most serious criticism is that the scientific base for the practice of forensic
psychology is inadequate (Grisso, 1987, 1993). This is not a comment on the state of
knowledge in criminological psychology, psycholegal research, or other areas of
psychology on which forensic psychologists must draw. Rather does it relate to
14 Ronald Blackbum
empirical research of direct relevance to answering legal questions, and it again
highlights the need to avoid imprecise use of the adjective ‘forensic’. Legal questions
often concern psychological issues about which empirical data are lacking. It is, of
course, one function of an expert witness to indcate when this is so, but there is more
than a suspicion that forensic psychologists may often go beyond the data and make
assertions which are not empirically defensible. Since people’s freedom and livelihood
may be at stake, this is a matter of ethical concern as well as of scientific integrity. I
will conclude with three examples of areas where the research seems deficient.
First, is the area of the assessment instruments used (Grisso, 1987). As I have noted,
the specialty most involved in forensic psychology in practice is clinical psychology,
and the tradition of operationalizing and quantifying psychological functions and
dysfunctions remains highly pertinent to many legal disputes. Some questions, for
example, about the extent of impairment resulting from head injury, or whether the
individual suffers from a particular emotional disability, can be answered quite well
with established psychological tests. However, the legal issue is usually related to a
specific question whch the tests were not designed to answer. For example, it appears
that standard tests of intelhgence and psychological adjustment are often used in
evidence about parental suitability for child custody. The utility and limits of these
instruments are likely to have been established in clinical populations, but research on
their ability to predict parenting skills does not seem to be available. There is therefore
a need for assessment procedures which are responsive to forensic issues. Steps have
been made in this direction, particularly in relation to assessing legal criteria of
competence and insanity in the United States. In t h l s country, Gudjonsson (1992) has
made several useful contributions, for example, in developing a measure of
suggestibility whch has been used to examine the reliabhty of confessions made to
the police. Such developments, however, remain exceptional.
A second illustration is the clinical prediction of dangerousness. Several
psychologsts have argued that in making assertions about dangerousness,
psychologsts are misrepresenting their competence, because the reliabhty and validity
of clinical judgement in this area has consistently been shown to be low (Faust &
Ziskin, 1988). Dangerousness predictions have been a sore point with clinicians for
some time. The research has ovenvhelmingly indicated that such predictions are wrong
more often than right, and this challenges the justification for the involvement of
mental health professionals in many areas of legal decision making. However, problems
of conducting adequate controlled studles and carrying out long-term follow-ups
render much of the research questionable. One recent study of short-term predictions
of future violence by patients in an American general psychiatric emergency clinic has
afforded some relief to clinicians in indicating better than chance predictive accuracy
P d z , Mulvey & Gardner, 1993). It has also been argued that with careful attention to
the literature, it is possible to make legally useful and accurate statements about the
probability of future violence for certain classes of individual given certain conditions
(Grisso & Appelbaum, 1992). However, the nature of the task in dangerousness
predictions has not been adequately conceptualized. Clinicians can, I believe, specify
the extent to whch a person has a disposition or tendency to behave violently. The
legal question, however, is more concerned with the likelihood of a future violent act,
which is about the occurrence of the conditions under which a violent tendency might
 what is forensic psycbohgy? 15

be realized. This is not the same question, because it is about forecasting future
situations. What is needed here is more research on the limits of prediction rather than
a continued search for evidence of magical powers on the part of psychologists and
psychiatrists.
A final example of forensic investigation where zeal may exceed scientific rigour is
the topical area of offender profiling. Offender profiling, known also as criminal
personality profiling or crime scene analysis, aims to assist police investigations by
reconstructing the probable type of offender from the crime scene evidence. The
principle that one can reconstruct the characteristics of people from their products has
a respectable scientific parentage, being used to good advantage in archaeology, but
profiling has aroused controversy because of suspicions of crystal gazing. One cynical
psychologist recently offered the following profile of a psychological profiler: he is ‘. . .
likely to be a white collar offender who is middle-aged, male, white, often with a beard,
usually in an academic or public sector post, possesses a psychology degree, and
demands millions of pounds of government money to continue profiling’ (Williams,
1994).
The problem with profiling is that it is a process of hypothesis generation in which
the validity of the hypothesis is rarely tested, and as profiling advice leads the police
to give attention to particular suspects it may lead to invasions of privacy which are
ethically unacceptable. Extensive press coverage was recently given to a London
murder trial in which the prosecution case collapsed because the only police evidence
against the defendant came from the advice of a forensic psychologst. This included
a dubious attempt at entrapment of the suspect, and the judge delivered an unequivocal
condemnation of the police use of offender profilers. Contrary to expectation, this has
not proved to be the death knell of offender profiling, but the notion of forensic
psychology as applied science has been brought into question.
The use of profiling has also recently been challenged by American psychologists
who scrutinized a related reconstructive technique called Equivocal Death Analysis
(Poythress, Otto, Darkes & Starr, 1993).This technique, hitherto unknown outside the
circle of FBI agents who developed it, attempts to establish the manner of a death
where this is unclear. It came to the attention of a panel of psychologists who were
asked by the House of Representatives Armed Services Committee to assess the
adequacy of a navy department investigation into an explosion aboard the USS Zowa
in 1989 which killed 47 sailors. The navy relied on the conclusion of an FBI Equivocal
Death Analysis that the explosion was the result of the planned suicide of one of the
dead sailors. The implications of this for the dead man’s family, for insurance claims,
and the apparent exoneration of the navy from charges of negligence were far reaching.
The panellists examining the report were appalled not only by the lack of any evidence
of validity of Equivocal Death Analysis, but also by the FBI agents’ disdainful dismissal
of the need for such evidence. The navy’s report was rejected, and evidence
subsequently emerged that the explosion was an accident. Psychologists reviewing this
case propose that reconstructive techniques should be used only under limited
circumstances which do not violate individual rights or mislead consumers.
As Grisso (1987) has observed, the goal of forensic psychology is to supply the legal
system with sound psychological information, and a research base is crucial to the
attainment of this goal. A problem with the legal forum is that it is a market place
16 Ronald Bkack bum
which attracts some and repels others, and there are currently grounds for concern
that not enough practitioners with a commitment to research are being attracted to
forensic psychology. Grisso suggests that we may need to use the logic and dynamics
of the marketplace to ensure this, but that needs to be debated in a different forum.

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