ABSTRACT
In criminal trials involving a defense of insanity, the prospective juror’s attitudes toward psychiatry and his ideas about mental illness could be important predictors of how the juror will respond to the issues in the trial he is about to hear. There were four items about attitudes toward the mentally ill, selected from a larger set known as the “Custodial Mental Illness Ideology Scale.” This scale has been tested many times and has been shown to differentiate reliably between humanistic and custodial attitudes toward persons who are mentally ill. The theoretical assumption is that the “humanistic” response will be more sympathetic to mental illness and therefore more favorably disposed toward accepting the defense of insanity. For each of the four questions the percentage of NGI verdicts of those selecting the “humanistic” alternative and those selecting the “custodial” alternative is virtually the same. Thus only conclude that this particular effort to discover discriminating juror attitudes failed.
