The creation and development of an instrument to determine fitness to stand trial

A research team, consisting of a jurist and a psychologist, created and developed an instrument which could be used to effectively assess the fitness to stand trial of an accused person. A questionnaire was compiled and sent out to 736 members of both the legal and mental health professions. The information received from the response group was used to compile the fitness instrument. This instrument was applied to 100 observandi, committed to Oranje Hospital in terms of the Criminal Procedure Act, by way of a semi-structured interview. The same 100 observandi were evaluated by a multi-disciplinary team of the hospital and the results of the two groups were compared. This comparison showed a significant resemblance and it was concluded that the instrument could successfully be used as a single method of evaluating triability.