ABSTRACT
I regularly attribute this error to the power of the vividness heuristic – the way that a single, vivid, memorable case overwhelms the mountains of abstract, colorless data on which rational choices should be made.3 And I think that, in large part, that is true. Although the so-called ‘battle of the experts’ is, in most cases, a myth,4
although the vast majority of insanity cases are ‘walk-throughs’5 and although most cases involving competency to stand trial determinations never reach the contested trial stage,6 those cases that are contested are vivid (not coincidentally, often because they involve high-profile crimes, victims or defendants, thus assuring saturation media coverage), and we tend to make many of our assumptions about the criminal justice system based on our knowledge about this relatively-small database.7
