Rogers Criminal Responsibility Assessment Scales

The Rogers Criminal Responsibility Assessment Scales were developed by Richard Rogers to meet the needs of the psychologist involved in a forensic practice within the criminal court system. As professionals in forensic practice realize, the construct of legal insanity is, at best, poorly linked to the knowledge we have of human behavior. The legal profession has developed at least four different standards of legal insanity: the McNaghten standard, the Irresistible Impulse standard, the American Law Institute standard, and the Guilty But Mentally Ill standard. The Rogers Criminal Responsibility Assessment Scales was designed by using gradations of severity to standardize the evaluation of clinical information, such that the ambiguity of the decision on criminal responsibility is minimized.

Scoring: The five scales produced by the Rogers Criminal Responsibility Assessment Scales are: patient reliability, organicity, psychopathology, cognitive control, and behavioral control. Each of 30 items are scaled in gradation against the anchor of increasing severity (e.g., 0 for no information; 1 for not present or not applicable; 2 for clinically insignificant; and 3 through 6 for increasing levels of severity).

Reliability and Validity: A cross-validation study based upon 111 client-defendants estimated the kappa reliabilities for each of the five Rogers Criminal Responsibility Assessment Scales subscales; the results ranged from .68 and .63 (original sample and cross-validation sample, respectively) to 1.00. Interrater reliability of decisions with regard to insanity were .93 for the original sample and 1.00 for the cross-validation sample. This research also included a discriminant analysis in terms of clients evaluated as sane and insane against the five subscales. Rogers et al. reports a 72% correct classification of sane and 99% classification of insane clients.