Abstract
This article examines several Supreme Court decisions and surveys recent literature and caselaw to ascertain whether the Court would uphold the use of psychiatric opinions in civil commitment proceedings. It will conclude that despite the empirical evidence that questions psychiatric expertise and the potential for erroneous confinement, the Supreme Court will continue to permit psychiatrists and other mental health professionals to proffer such testimony. This article further postulates that the Court should not, and will not, restrict or limit psychiatric opinions and judgments as to dangerousness, but rather should trust the adversarial process to ferret out reliable from unreliable evidence in both short-term and indeterminate commitment proceedings.
Recommended Citation
Laura K. Haddad,
Predicting the Supreme Court's Response to the Criticism of Psychiatric Predictions of Dangerousness in Civil Commitment Proceedings,
64 Neb. L. Rev.
(1985)
Available at: https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/nlr/vol64/iss2/3