January 4, 2021

Community-based sentencing (CBS) in Singapore came into force on 2 January 2011 and was meant to provide flexibility in sentencing. The options include the Mandatory Treatment Order (MTO), which enables judges to mandate compulsory psychiatric treatment in lieu of a custodial sentence after verification of the offender’s mental illness by a court-appointed psychiatrist. In ‘Psychology and psychiatry in Singapore courts: A baseline survey of the mental health landscape in the legal arena’ (International Journal of Law and Psychiatry, 2016), Adjunct Assistant Professor Kenji Gwee (NUS Department of Psychology) studies court trial cases in Singapore from 1975-2014 to reveal trends in the legal arena involving expert input on mental health. He finds that psychologists and psychiatrists were increasingly involved and there were differences in how they influenced criminal, civil, and custody cases.

Prior to 2000, the average number of cases with psychological input per year increased from 0.5 prior to 2000 to six from 2000-2013. The same indicator but for psychiatric input showed an increase from one to two, to 23. Mental health input in local courts is clearly on the rise. Specifically, the majority of psychologists (65%) and psychiatrists (83%) consulted were involved in criminal cases instead of civil and custody cases. Within the criminal cases, experts were more often employed at the sentencing than the conviction or trial stages.

In examining the utility of expert input for the judges, Asst Prof Gwee suggests that there is an existing preference of psychiatry over psychology in Singapore courts. Inputs from psychiatrists were more often “elaborated upon” as compared to being “briefly mentioned” in criminal and civil cases. However, in custody cases, the reverse is true; Asst Prof Gwee believes psychiatrists played a lesser role here because custody cases had the least incidence of mental illness.

Asst Prof Gwee concludes that the increasing use of psychological input in local courts is testament to the forensic utility of the field. He calls for professional standards in psychology to be continually adhered to, for greater research on the intersection between psychology, psychiatry, and law, for legal actors to be well-versed with mental health input, and for judges to clearly explicate their reasoning behind accepting or rejecting expert testimony so that legal and scientific fields can be informed on how expert input can and cannot be useful.

Read the article here.