Empathy or objectivity: The forensic examiner's dilemma?

Examiners are ethically bound to manage personal biases that may infect their expert opinions. Empathy-related issues that lead to bias in forensic assessment of adjudicative competence arise in evaluation interactions with defendants (therapeutic empathy) and from examiners' personal views of issues that these assessments address (empathy-bias). This article first summarizes flexible adjudicative competence legal standards that invite bias by forensic experts.

Drafting the parenting evaluation court order: a conceptual and practical approach.

A court's order begins and directs the process of a court-appointed parenting evaluation. If the order is ill-defined, the evaluation, its conclusions, and the resulting expert opinion may be compromised. To draft a clear order, lawyers should understand the nature of a psychological evaluation, identify the legal bases and the authority in psychological literature and ethics for conducting a parenting evaluation, and establish the specific purposes for the court-ordered evaluation.