What are the neuropsychological aspects of competency to stand trial?
There is very little research on this. There was one study some years back from Bridgewater State Hospital in Massachusetts where they measured the neurocognitive functioning of individuals found competent and not competent to stand trial. There were some difficulties in the study because they were predominantly psychiatric diagnoses rather than neurocognitive ones, and race and cultural issues may have played a part in the results as well. The 1999 study was done by Nestor, Daggett, Haycock, and Price who retrospectively studied the neuropsychological functioning of 181 competency evaluees. Results suggested competent defendants score higher in areas of psychometric intelligence, attention, memory (particularly verbal), and verbal and non-verbal social intelligence. Surprisingly, there were no differences in general abstract reasoning, but the measures they used in this regard were not necessarily that sensitive and the results were confounded by the presence of other mental illness b
