Delusions of Justice: Results of Qualitative Research on the Management in British Columbia of Cases Involving Allegations of Substance-Induced Psychosis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In R. v. Bouchard-Lebrun, [2011] 3 S.C.R. 575, the Supreme Court of Canada prescribed a legal framework for the application of the defence of not-criminally-responsible-by-reason-of-mental-disorder (“NCRMD”) in the cases involving substance-induced psychosis. In doing so, the Court brought much needed clarification to the law. However, it also opened the door to the difficult question of whether the NCRMD defence should be expanded to capture those cases where the onset of psychotic symptoms is attributable – even in part – to co-occurring mental disorder or neurobiological vulnerability on the part of the accused. Under investigation in this study is the management of such cases in the criminal justice system. Reported herein are the results of interviews conducted with lawyers and forensic psychiatrists in British Columbia. They reveal a considerable risk of unpredictability in outcome for accused persons. This lack of predictability may stem from uncertainties inherent the law, but it is exacerbated by shortcomings in the available evidence, resource constraints within the criminal justice system, and the normative perspectives of those responsible for the management of cases in that system. These results bring to light troubling issues not apparent in the reported case law, including the question of whether forensic psychiatrists are in fact in a position to provide the evidence that the law requires to support a defence of NCRMD, and whether a prevailing lack of confidence in the forensic mental health system would deter legal counsel from recommending that defence, even if that evidence became available to them.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.021 | 0.056 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.035 | 0.025 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.006 | 0.012 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".