Competency Should Not Be Legal

When evaluating practice with individuals, families, groups, organizations, and communities, it is necessary that Competency 2: Ethical Practice and Competency 3: Critical Thinking are taken into consideration. Competency 2 requires that social workers are able to recognize and manage personal values in a way that allows professional values to guide practice. Competency 3 requires social workers to demonstrate effective oral and written communication in working with individuals, families, groups, communities, organizations, and colleagues. By following these competency skills, a social worker is able to evaluate their experience with these different populations without being bias, and can display diversity within the profession of social work.

Physical and/or Mental Capacity: Severe physical or mental impairments or a combination of disabilities which cause a person to lose functional capability and/or awareness of their environment is a massive hindrance to independence and participation, eventually causing exclusion. For example a person who has lost motion in the body and is bed ridden cannot physically participate in any activity.

They understand the value in ethical and professional behavior and the impact it has on their work. Social workers must maintain the highest form of ethical practice because of their intense work in the community. Social workers use NASW Code of Ethics to help them make the most ethical decision because they often hold a lot of weight. Social workers also know how to differentiate their personal beliefs even when in difficult situations. They do not mix their values as a social worker with their values as a person and therefore do not let their beliefs affect their work. Social workers understand the importance of maintaining professional behavior because it can affect their

4. Made by a person with legal capacity - Competency is “the ability to perform a job.” In normal conditions this part mentions to an adult of complete mind who is able to pass the three tests defined above. Those considered not legally capable would include minors, and those who are so physiologically or psychologically troubled, they do not validate the ability to make informed judgements(Steer,

One of the competency based assessment’s key theoretical foundations, the biopsychosocial framework could be found in mental health settings and used by practitioners other that social workers (Gray & Zide, 2007; Davis, 2014). Concerns and criticisms levelled at psychiatry’s non-human oriented, diagnostic focus, motivated the creation of the biopsychosocial framework (Pilgrim, 2002 as cited in Davis, 2014). One goal of the framework was to make people more amenable to psychiatric services because of an increased focus on the whole person (Davis, 2014). It was developed in part by uniting (Stoudemire, 1994 in Gray & Zide, 2007) the biomedical model which has a focus on diagnosis and the psychodynamic model which has a “[focus] on symptoms, behaviours, and underlying psychological processes” (Gray & Zide, 2007, p. 11). The competency based assessment is compatible with a biopsychosocial framework in mental health because both have a similar holistic focus (Gray & Zide, 2007; Davis, 2014). Both hold that in order to gain insight about a client’s current functioning and inciting events, a thorough assessment must occur with a full history focusing on specific nuances such as the many systems the client interacts with (Gray & Zide, 2007; Davis, 2014). This could make the competency based assessment a good fit for a biopsychosocial setting.

The jury system in America is also influence by the English jury system. Another one of America’s constitutional right is due process which is the basic for fairness that is important in the judicial system which allows our system to work with honor and integrity. According to Currie (1992), the factors of due process involve the United States Constitution; Amendments V, and XIV and in 1970 Illinois State Constitution adopted some rights for due process.

To guarantee that people hold as much self-governance or self-assurance as is legitimately conceivable, the court makes an assurance of one's capability in an errand particular way. For instance, one can be resolved to be uncouth to execute a will, yet might be esteemed skillful to settle on treatment choices. At whatever point conceivable, endeavors are made to settle inadequacy in this way. Be that as it may, there are statutes that take into account the assurance of general incompetency.8,9 In such cases, people who are in diligent

Courts and the jurors serving in them need to be cautious when listening to expert testimony given, regarding the mental capabilities or sanity of an individual. This is because it is impossible to go into the mind of the defendant and know for a fact that they are mentally capable, which causes any assessment to be in part guesswork. Also the definition of what the judiciary has considered mentally insane has changed through time and in different legal systems. I argue that expert testimony in cases regarding mental sanity is not uniform and varies in different instances. As a society should be trying to make the definitions and assessment of sanity the uniform in all of the states and United States federal courts for persons to be tried

The standard for competency to stand trial in the United States is that the defendant must be both oriented to time and place and able to recall events as to assist their lawyer, and able to communicate properly to the counsel with rational and factional understanding of the proceedings against them, a standard that has been adopted by every state in the United States (Dusky v. United States). To be regarded as incompetent, the defendant must not meet these standards and also has to be mentally ill, though this does not include things like antisocial personality, substance abuse, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder. A defendant can be tested for competence to stand trial at any time during the criminal proceeding. A defendant's irrational behavior,

I enjoyed reading "The Anders brief in appeals from civil commitment" by Frueh and was captivated by the idea that many legal representatives are unsure of how to understand their clients who have mental issues and are unable to have them tested properly as well as how they struggle to give them proper legal representation. My initial surprise concerning the representation of individuals with mental issues centers on our understanding as a society of mental issues in children yet we seem incapable of that same understanding or compassion when these children become adults. This idea that you are an adult therefore you can just turn off your mental defects is ludicrous because as a person grows older they typically stay the same or become more difficult to control as the stressors in a person 's life become more extreme. However I am the first to state that these mental issues are not enough to keep a person from being held accountable for their actions, rather I feel they deserve a proper evaluation in order to understand their legal representation and court proceedings. This is merely one of the reasons why the Anders brief is so important in how a defendant is represented before, during, and after a trial, which ensures that they receive appropriate representation. I believe this article gave a great understanding of the Anders brief, how it works for the defendant and the positives and negatives

The treatment of mentally ill offenders in the criminal justice system has been a recent topic of discussion. Not all judges take the same outlook on cases that include someone with an altered mental state. Some are more sympathetic, understanding they are not completely sane, but others see them as just another criminal. These judges feel they should be treated the same as every other person who breaks the law. They want to bring justice to the case, and put the trial to rest by incarcerating the offender. “When mentally ill people carry out planned and even deliberately planned violent or

There are many people with mental disorders in U.S.A and many of those people end up in jail. Some people may think this is good, worse people in jail right, wrong. So many mentally ill people are prosecuted and sometimes are not even given the option to go to somewhere that is more qualified to hold them. The words mentally ill to describe a person often gets lost in context when people talk about this subject. The definition of a mentally ill person is “a person who thinks, acts, and behaves differently”. There are reasons why this is bad and they are it is bad to keep the mentally ill in prison, how much this issue effects, and how harsh it is for the mentally ill in prisons. This issue needs to be stopped.

Image a life where you have difficulty defending yourself and nobody can clearly understand you. Now visualize trying to convince others that you are innocent of a crime. Since the early 80s, more than sixty mentally ill criminals have been executed the US (Mental Illness on Death Row). This paper will discuss the relationship between the law and the challenges faced by mentally criminals from tries to appeals and execution. It provides examples of some of the more famous cases of the execution of the mentally ill and describes current legislative. But we would try answer the whether the mentally disabled criminals should be charged with a death penalty. Throughout this paper, we will use Borromeo 's definition of someone with mental issues. He stated "mental retardation is a lifelong condition of impaired or incomplete mental development..." ( Borromeo 178). Some examples of these illnesses include but are not limited to major depression, bipolar disorder, post traumatic stress disorder and borderline personality disorder .

Competency in the legal system can be dated all the way back to Common Law when a defendant nearly had to possess a sufficient mental capacity and an understanding of the trial ahead of him. As stated before it wasn’t until the 1960s when the Supreme Court ruled in Dusky v. United States that competency became a constitutional requirement.

A significant and controversial issue within the legal system is the ‘insanity defense’ in which during a criminal trial, the defendant will make a claim that they are not guilty by reason of insanity, or in other words, they have deficient and impaired cognitive and mental capabilities. These mental health problems associated with insanity are caused by psychopathological disorders, which may have led to their dysfunction. What separates this from a regular plead of ‘diminished capacity’ is that a plea of insanity is a full defense rather than just a partial defense (Legal information institute, n.d.). With the diminished capacity defense, the defendant’s mental competence is still the focus, although they are pleading to a lesser crime