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Reformed Commitment Procedures: An Empirical Study in the Courtroom

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

Virginia Aldige Hiday
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Abstract

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Court proceedings and records were analyzed to evaluate statutory reform of mental commitment procedure in one state with a typical statute. A marked improvement over practice described in previous research was found: court proceedings were not rapid and perfunctory. However, the court still often deferred to psychiatric opinion even when a preponderance of evidence showed it to be unsubstantiated.

Type
Research Article
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 11 , Issue 4 , Spring 1977 , pp. 651 - 666
Copyright
Copyright © 1977 The Law and Society Association

Footnotes

Preparation of this paper was supported by NIMH Grant MH13112 to the Departments of Sociology and Psychiatry, Duke University. Particular thanks are expressed to Management Information System—Statistics, North Carolina Division of Mental Health Services, which provided state hospital data, and to court officials who gave their time and energy to facilitate court data collection.

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