정신감정이 재판에 미치는 영향

The Criminal Responsibility of Mental Patients; Psychiatric Opinion and Court Disposition

The purpose of the present study is to clarify the differences which exist between psychiatric opinions on the criminal responsibilities of mental patients and the final results of court dispositions by judges. For this purpose the author reviewed the reports of psychiatric evaluations on 42 mental patients who had been referred to determine the criminal responsibility from the court of Taegu area between January of 1977 and December of 1984. The data obtained were analyzed in terms of several aspects; demographic background, clinical diagnosis, kinds of crimes and criminal motivations. In addition, the psychiatric opinion regarding criminal responsibility was compared to the final sentence of the court of respective defendants. The results could be summarized as follows: monly met subjects were male, single, in their twenties, with educational background of six years or under, who were unemployed and came from rural districts. About half of all the subjects were diagnosed as schizophrenia, one fourth of them were categorized as personality disorder, and another one fourth as mental retardation, major affective disorder, dissociative disorder, paranoid disorder, substance use disorder and psychosexual disorder. The most frequent criminal act was homicide (45%), and the mental states at the time of the criminal acts could be inferred as those of paroxysmal emotional uncontrollable state(40%), acute delusional, hallucinatory and confusional state (36%) and infantile regressive state (10%), etc. According to psychiatric reports, out of 42 defendants, 19 defendants were evaluated to be totally out of criminal responsibility, 21 defendants to be partially responsible and 2 defendants to be fully responsible. They were well contrasted by the final decisions of the court sentence; 5 defendants, totally out of criminal responsibility, 29 of restricted criminal responsibility and 8, of full resposibility. This means that the judges agree with the psychiatric opinions of the presence and absence of the defendant’s mental illness but disagree in his severity of the illness. With the above results, the author thinks that the intimate communication between the psychiatrists and the judges would be imminent to exchange the profes- Regarding the demographic background, most com- sional informations