REVIEW OF FORENSIC ASSESSMENT INSTRUMENTS

Assessments related to defendants' capacities to waive rights to silence and legal counsel will benefit by the evaluation of functional abili­ties or capacities that are recognized by legal standards as relevant for competent waiver of rights.

Readers may also be interested in examining the Gudjonsson Suggestibility Scale (Gudjonsson, 1992). The instrument was developed to examine suspects' individual differences in the degree to which they may yield to suggestions by police officers, thus providing a distorted or false confession. The instrument is not reviewed here because the reliability of suspects' statements, and factors that may cause them to be distorted, is a separate issue from the validity of their waiver of Miranda rights. The instrument is described in a book by Gudjonsson (1992) and has been the focus of much research (for reviews, see Gudjonsson, Rutter, & Clare, 1995; Gudjonsson & Sigurdsson, 1995, 1996).

Comprehension of Miranda Rights (CMR)

Author

Grisso, T.

Author Affiliation

Department of Psychiatry, University of Massachusetts Medical school

Primary Reference

Grisso, T. (1998b). Instruments for Assessing Understanding and Appreciation of Miranda Rights. Sarasota, FL: Professional Resource Press

Description

The Comprehension of Miranda Rights (CMR) measure was developed to assess adolescents' and adults' understanding of the rights to silence and to legal counsel, as these rights are conveyed by a standard form used in law enforcement procedures.

The CMR is administered with the aid of a "flip-chart," desk-top easel that shows examinee stimuli on the side facing the examinee and administration instructions on the side facing the examiner (d). The stim­uli consist of the four Miranda warnings, shown individually, as follows:

1. You do not have to make a statement and have the right to remain silent.

2. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law.

3. You are entitled to consult an attorney before interrogation and to have an attorney present at the time of the interrogation.

4. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be appointed for you.

Each stimulus sentence is shown to the examinee and read aloud by the examiner in the testing session. After each stimulus the examiner asks: "Tell me in your own words what is said in that sentence." Standardized inquiry questions are printed on the examiner side of the easel pages, requesting information when the examinee's response uses certain phrases verbatim rather than paraphrased, and when the initial response is vague or confusing.

The manual (d) provides scoring criteria and examples for assigning each of the four responses 2-point (adequate), 1-point (questionable), or 0-point (inadequate) credit, so that total points range from 0-8. If an examinee's first response to an item is less adequate than a later response following one of the standardized inquiry questions, generally the exami­nee is credited with the best response.

Conceptual Basis

concept definition. The project within which the CMR was devel­oped analyzed the valid waiver of Miranda rights as depending on two broad classes of circumstances: procedural circumstances (e.g., time and place of the waiver), and nonprocedural circumstances involving prima­rily the characteristics of the defendant. The latter set of circumstances was conceptualized as addressing "competence to waive rights."

A review of legal cases (c) suggested three components defining the concept of competence to waive rights:

• comprehension of rights (understanding the rights and entitlements)

• beliefs about the legal context (understanding and belief concern­ing the significance of the rights in the context of interactions with law enforcement officers, legal counsel, and the court), and

• problem solving (capacities to weigh and consider the rights and to form meaningful expectancies in the process of deciding whether to waive rights).

Therefore, "comprehension of rights" (the focus of the CMR) was seen as only one of three components for considering a defendant's capacities to waive Miranda rights, pertaining only to the defendant's ability to under­stand what rights were said to be available, as informed by Miranda warn­ings. Further, although the three components together might serve to represent a defendant's waiver competence, the validity of waiver was recognized to be a broader, legal construct encompassing not only waiver competence but also procedural and circumstantial characteristics of the waiver event itself.

operational definition. The CMR was developed as one of three operational definitions of the comprehension of Miranda rights compo­nent of waiver competency (see also CMR-R and CMV, in this chapter).

• collection of a large number of responses in a pilot procedure within a juvenile court detention center population,

• study and recommendations by several panels of legal consultants (local and national) to categorize and define these responses as adequate, questionable, and inadequate,

• development of formal scoring criteria and sets of examples for each item on the basis of the panel recommendations, and

• development and empirical study of the use and reliability of a scoring manual with additional sets of juveniles and adults in legal settings.

Consultation involving legal professionals was an integral part of this process. For example, an interdisciplinary team of psychologists and attor­neys (in juvenile courts and in an advocacy juvenile law center) worked together to produce the system for categorizing responses incorporated into the scoring manual. The tentative scoring criteria were submitted for review and comment to a national panel of juvenile court attorneys, juvenile law advocates, and judges.

critique. The definition of the construct underlying the CMR (comprehension of Miranda rights) clearly indicates that it does not define competence to waive rights, but rather defines one cognitive component that contributes to that broader construct as defined by legal interpretations of competence to waive Miranda rights. The primary reference indicates that comprehension of Miranda rights is presumed to relate to psychological constructs of a developmental, cognitive nature (e.g., general intelligence, formal cognitive development), as well as learning and exposure to infor­mation concerning rights in legal contexts.

The development of the CMR manifests considerable attention to content relevance and face validity.

A chief concern, however, is the wording of the warnings used in the instrument, which were the wordings used by the St. Louis Police Department at the time of the study. Grisso (c) claimed that the wordings used in the CMR were similar to those used in other jurisdictions. However, while most jurisdictions use the same four general warnings, a wide range of variations in wording have developed across the past two decades. Some police departments, for example, use the word "question­ing" instead of the word "interrogation" that appears in the standardized CMR administration. Some use "lawyer" instead of "attorney." Some add a fifth warning, to the effect that if the suspect waives the rights and agrees to talk to police officers, the suspect still has the right to stop at any time (in other words, may re-invoke the rights after having waived them).

In actual practice, it is possible to substitute local wordings of the warnings for those in the CMR, because the scoring system is such that it can be applied to suspects' responses regardless of the wording of the warnings. However, if these warnings are worded very differently from the standardized statements in the CMR, the scores obtained cannot be compared meaningfully to the norms provided in the manual (which were obtained with the standardized wording of the warnings).

The CMR was not conceptualized as an index of the examinee's understanding of Miranda rights at the time of police interrogation, but rather at the time of the assessment itself. Inferences about the relation of current understanding to understanding in situations in the past would require additional evidence and reasoning beyond CMR performance in an evaluation session.

The choice of a paraphrase response format is well grounded in past research on the evaluation of knowledge and understanding. Paraphrase formats, however, may be subject to interpretation error due to verbal expressive difficulties of many delinquent youths (and some adults). That is, some examinees might not be able to express verbally what they understand. This problem is mitigated by the availability of parallel instruments using other response formats (see CMR-R and CMV), but it suggests caution if the CMR is administered as the sole measure of com­prehension of Miranda rights in a clinical assessment.

Psychometric Development

standardization. Administration and scoring criteria are described in detail in the primary reference and are highly standardized. For exam­ple, only certain inquiry questions may be asked and only under parti­cular, narrowly defined response circumstances. Scoring criteria are provided by general statements of principle for each level of scores, by numerous specific examples, and by a description of the scoring process itself.

reliability. The manual (d) provides interrater reliability coeffi­cients between pairs of three experienced raters and an inexperienced rater, at different levels of experience during a research project, for indi­vidual CMR items and for CMR total scores. Generally, interrater coeffi­cients are reported in the range of.80 to.97, with 90% perfect scoring agreements in one sample of 912 scoring events (c, p. 243). Better than 90% agreement was also reported by two other studies involving independent scoring of protocols by multiple raters, using samples of adult defendants with and without mental retardation (a, b). Test-retest within 48 hours for a sample of 24 juveniles (IQ = 69-117, M = 97.2) yielded a Pearson corre­lation coefficient of.84 (c).

norms. Juveniles' and adults' CMR scores may be compared to normative data on juveniles and adults collected in the research project for which the CMR was developed (c). The juvenile sample consisted of 431 juvenile court detainees and residents of juvenile delinquency rehabil­itation centers in St. Louis, Missouri. Ages ranged from 10 to 16, about two-thirds were male, and about three-fourths were white. Intelligence test scores ranged from 70 and below (11%) to 101 and above (22%) (M = 88), and most youths had one or more court referrals prior to their current referral. The adult sample included 203 offenders residing in halfway houses in St. Louis that took referrals from state and federal cor­rectional agencies for offenders reentering the community. The mean age was 25 (lowest age is 17), about 80% were male and 40% were white. In the normative tables, CMR means are provided separately for juveniles and for adults for age-by-IQ classifications.

critique. Standardization appears to be adequate. Scoring manifests the capacity for good rater reliability with adequate training or practice. The normative data are based on population samples with particular rele­vance for individual legal cases in which the instrument may be employed clinically. Some care should be taken in employing the juvenile norms in jurisdictions where juvenile court populations manifest a higher proportion of racial minorities than in the normative samples.

One concern with the norms and their current utility is the fact that they were collected over 20 years ago. It may be that youths and adults today have no greater familiarity with Miranda rights than in the late 1970s, but it is possible that such matters are better understood by some youths in the 21st century. No research other than the original study that produced the CMR has produced norms for general juvenile justice or criminal justice populations. At this writing, two large studies are under­way to replicate, update, and extend the original studies with the CMR and its companion instruments. These studies will help to address whether the current norms should continue to be applied.

Construct Validation

In the original study (c), correlations between scores on the four CMR items were relatively low (r =.20-.30), while item scores correlated substan­tially (r =.55-73) with total CMR scores. Thus each item may be assessing considerably different content from other items, yet with sufficient com­monality to suggest their interpretive relation to a single construct.

In the juvenile sample of the original study (n = 431), CMR scores correlated adequately with scores on two companion tests, all three instru­ments having been developed in relation to the same construct and using similar content but different stimulus and response formats (correlation with CMV,.67; with CMR-R,.55). (See CMV and CMR-R reviews in this chapter.) No correlations between these tests were reported for the adult sample.

CMR scores correlated.47 with short-form Wechsler intelligence test scores for juveniles. In analyses of variance, CMR scores were signifi­cantly related to IQ scores for juveniles and adults, independent of vari­ance related to race and socioeconomic status (c). In a separate study, significantly lower CMR scores were found for persons with mental retar­dation than for persons without mental retardation (a).

CMR scores manifested a small, significant correlation with age within the original juvenile sample (r =.19), but not in the adult sample (c). Very significant differences in CMR scores were found between the juvenile and adult samples (which did not differ significantly in mean IQ or socioeco­nomic status). For the juveniles with IQ scores above 80, CMR performance appeared to reach a plateau (similar to average adult performance) at about age 16; among juveniles with IQ scores of 80 and below, however, CMR performance generally was poorer than that of adults with similarly low IQ scores. Juveniles below 14 years performed significantly more poorly than did juveniles 14 to 16 and adults (c).

Above IQ scores of 80, CMR was not related to race in the juvenile sample; below this IQ, African-American juveniles in general performed significantly more poorly on the CMR than did white juveniles with simi­larly low IQ scores.

In the original CMR study, adult defendants with greater experience with the justice system (e.g., number of prior court felony referrals) had a significantly greater mean CMR score than those with less experience. Similarly, another study found that CMR mean scores for persons with mental retardation were greater for those currently involved in the crimi­nal justice system (on probation) than for those who were contacted through sheltered workshops (b).

In the original juvenile sample, however, amount of prior experience was not related to CMR scores; instead, it was related positively (and sig­nificantly) to CMR scores for white juveniles, and negatively for African- American juveniles (c). That is, African-American juveniles with more court experience manifested poorer CMR scores than did African- American juveniles with less court experience.

Critique. The relations between CMR scores and performance on its companion measures suggests that the instruments focus on a common construct. The significant but relatively lower correlation between these instruments and IQ scores suggests that the construct assessed is not merely general intelligence, but rather a construct that is more specific to the content of the instruments.

Several of the results are consistent with what would be predicted on the basis of age and developmental perspectives concerning cognitive capacities of juveniles and adults. For example, the poor performance of juveniles under 14, relative to older juveniles and adults, is consistent with the theoretical view that the age range of 11 to 14 is a critical period for the development of formal operational thinking typical of adults' cog­nitive processes. Tables in the original reference and the manual (c, d) show several expected mental-age effects when age and intelligence test scores are employed together in analyses of CMR scores.

Some results related to race suggest caution in interpretation of the CMR with African-American juveniles. Specifically, African-American juveniles with low IQ scores performed more poorly than white juveniles with similar ages and low IQ scores. This may be due to the paraphrase format of the CMR, which requires decoding of a message in standard (and somewhat legalistic) English and encoding to produce a response

expressing one's understanding intelligibly to another person. Both the encoding and decoding processes might be more difficult for some subset of African-American juveniles with cultural exposure to a linguistic back­ground other than standard English. Thus they may be at a particular dis­advantage in understanding the message of Miranda warnings in their usual form. In addition, however, the CMR format might place them at a special disadvantage to manifest what they do understand about the rights to silence and counsel.

The CMR offers no safeguards against attempts by examinees to appear less knowledgeable about the Miranda rights than they might actu­ally be. At least some examinees might understand the potential benefits of exclusion of their confession from trial evidence, as well as the role of the examiner's test results in a court's deliberations about the validity of the waiver and the confession. Knowing this, they might attempt to dis­simulate by providing inadequate CMR responses. Detection of dissimu­lation might be enhanced by comparing CMR responses to other data about the examinee's general intelligence, or by an examination of pat­terns of errors across the CMR and its companion tests (CMR-R, CMV).

Predictive or Classificatory Utility

There have been no studies of the relation of CMR scores to juveniles' or adults' Miranda understanding or their waiver choices at the time of actual police interrogation procedures. Further, no studies have examined CMR scores in relation to independent judgments (e.g., by judges or attor­neys) concerning individuals' competence to waive Miranda rights or to understand Miranda warnings.

Critique. CMR scores obtained in an assessment at some time after police interrogation and rights waiver cannot be used as an empirical definition of the examinee's degree of understanding of the Miranda warnings at the time of the waiver event. Inferences of this type would require additional information, as discussed in the last section of this chapter.

Potential for Expressing Person-Situation Congruency

The CMR procedure and its use of a standardized wording of the Miranda rights sometimes will not parallel the actual manner in which a juvenile or adult was informed of the rights by police officers in an earlier arrest situation. Officers may have given only a cursory, "boilerplate" reading of the warnings, or they might have taken great pains to give the warnings in a simplified fashion. The question may arise, then, whether the comprehension demands of the police procedure were greater or less than that of the CMR procedure in an examination session, and whether an examinee's CMR performance therefore offers a reason­able basis for making inferences about understanding of the rights at the time of the arrest.

One approach to this problem would be to modify the CMR procedure to approximate more nearly the wording used by police officers in a partic­ular case. This, of course, would require a transcript of the wording used by police, and transcripts or audiotapes of these events usually are not available. Even if this strategy were possible, however, other demand vari­ables (e.g., time of day, suspect's fatigue, pressures and anxieties engen­dered by questioning at a police station) that might impair understanding of the warnings generally cannot be studied in the CMR procedure.

Some jurisdictions have prepared standard warnings to suspects that employ somewhat different wording than that used in the CMR. The rela­tion of an examinee's CMR performance to the demands of these other wordings might be compared by subjecting the jurisdiction's standard form to a readability formula, which analyzes verbal material for its read­ing or comprehension difficulty using sentence lengths and syllables per 100 words (e). The CMR wording of the warnings used in the original study was identified in this way as being at an eighth grade level of read­ing difficulty, corresponding to the reading ability of the average 14-year- old (c). The demand of other Miranda warning forms could be examined in like manner.

References

(a) Everington, C., & Fulero, S. (1999). Competence to confess: Measuring understanding and suggestibility of defendants with mental retardation. Mental Retardation, 37, 212-220.

(b) Fulero, S., & Everington, C. (1995). Assessing competency to waive Miranda rights in defendants with mental retardation. Law and Human Behavior, 19, 533-543.

(c) Grisso, T. (1981). Juveniles' waiver of rights: Legal and psychological competence. New York: Plenum Press.

(d) Grisso, T. (1998b). Instruments for assessing understanding and appreciation of Miranda rights. Sarasota, FL: Resource Press.

(e) Grunder, T. (1978). Two formulas for determining the readability of subject consent forms. American Psychologist, 33, 773-775.

Comprehension of Miranda Rights—Recognition (CMR-R)

Author

Grisso, T.

Author Affiliation

Department of Psychiatry, University of Massachusetts Medical School

Primary Reference

Grisso, T. (1998b). Instrumentsfor Assessing Understanding and Appreciation of Miranda Rights. Sarasota, FL: Professional Resource Press

Description

The Comprehension of Miranda Rights—Recognition (CMR-R) was originally entitled the Comprehension of Miranda Rights—True/False (b), but was retitled when the instrument was published commercially (c). It was developed as a companion measure to the CMR and CMV (see reviews preceding and following this review), in order to assess understanding of standard Miranda warnings concerning the rights to silence and legal counsel at the time of questioning and arrest by law enforcement officers. It was intended to complement the other two measures in that it demands less of examinees by way of verbal expressive capacities (b).

The CMR-R is administered with the aid of a "flip-chart," desk-top easel that shows examinee stimuli on the side facing the examinee and administration instructions on the side facing the examiner (c). The stim­uli consist of the four Miranda warnings, each shown individually, and worded according to the four standard Miranda warning statements used in the CMR (see preceding review). The examinee is shown and read the first warning statement and is told:

I will read three more statements. Each statement means either the same thing or not the same thing as the [sentence on the card]. I want you to tell me whether each statement is the same or different from the sentence on the card.

(b, p. 234)

on the stimulus page facing the examinee, three sentences are printed beneath the warning statement. The examiner then reads the first of these sentences and asks whether it means the same thing or is different from the Miranda warning at the top of the page. The same is done for the sec­ond and third alternatives. For example, the three stimulus sentences for the first Miranda warning ("You do not have to make a statement and

have the right to remain silent") are:

1. It is not right to tell lies.

2. You should not say anything until the police ask you questions.

3. You do not have to say anything about what you did.

The administration then proceeds to the second Miranda warning and its three corresponding same-or-different items. In each triad there are either one "same" and two "different" alternatives, or one "different" and two "same" alternatives (6 "same" and 6 "different" alternatives in all), and the arrangement of "same" and "different" items varies across the four Miranda statements. One point is received for each correct response, so that scores on the CMR-R range from 0 to 3 for each of the four Miranda warnings and 0 to 12 for the total CMR-R.

Conceptual Basis

concept definition. The instrument was intended to assess "com­prehension ofMiranda warnings," the same construct defined in the pre­ceding review of the CMR.

Operational definition. The CMR-R was intended to offer a method for assessing Miranda comprehension by recognition of similar meanings, rather than by ability to construct a paraphrase response as in the CMR. This dictated its format and content. The sentences providing similar and dissimilar meanings were selected from among a larger number by elimi­nating sentences that did not manifest heterogeneity of scores.

critique. The method used in the CMR-R would seem to have the potential to reduce measurement error due to examinees' difficulties in encoding a message to express that which they understand, since it requires virtually no verbal expressive ability. Thus it could reduce the instances in which examinees may be perceived as lacking essential under­standing merely because they cannot verbalize what they know. The use of the CMR-R in conjunction with the CMR and CMV offers a multimethod approach to the assessment of comprehension of Miranda rights, with the potential to reduce interpretative error that may result from assessment by a single method.

The CMR-R format does not provide sufficient evidence that exami­nees have usable knowledge of the Miranda warnings, because they might not have grasped the meaning of the warnings until they were supplied with various interpretive sentences with which to evaluate the warning. This is not necessarily a weakness in the CMR-R, given its objectives. It was not intended to be the sole index of Miranda comprehension in an assessment. The logic of its format merely underscores the importance of administering it in conjunction with its companion measures.

Psychometric Development

standardization. Administration is highly standardized, and scoring requires no discretionary judgment.

reliability. Test-retest stability of the CMR-R has not been examined. No examination of interscorer reliability is required, due to the completely objective scoring criteria.

norms. CMR-R scores may be compared to norms in the original research samples (b, c), including 105 juveniles and 203 adults. These sam­ples were similar to those described in the previous review of the CMR in terms of age, race, gender, and prior justice system experiences.

critique. Psychometric development appears to be adequate except for the lack of empirical information on the stability of CMR-R scores. Use of the norms should take into consideration the racial or socioeconomic composition of the normative sample, in relation to these characteristics of the examinee in an individual case.

Construct Validation

The original research study (b) demonstrated a correlation of r =.55 between the CMR-R and the CMR, administered to a sample of 105 juve­niles in a court detention center. CMR-R scores were significantly related to IQ scores (r =.43) and to age of juveniles (r =.21). Similar analyses for adults were not performed, but another study (a) found that adults with mental retardation scored substantially poorer than the adult sample in the original study.

Most of the more detailed analyses of relations between comprehen­sion measures and juveniles' characteristics in the original research study (b) did not employ the CMR-R, due to the smaller size of the CMR-R sam­ple as well as its secondary research importance in relation to the other two measures. It was used to test one hypothesis concerning the significant relation between race and CMR scores (African-Americans obtained sig­nificantly lower CMR scores than whites, even when variance due to dif­ferences in IQ scores was statistically controlled). It was suspected that African-Americans might have obtained a lower mean CMR score because of a greater number of African-American subjects having greater difficulty in encoding (paraphrasing) what they understood in standard English. The same race/comprehension effect was obtained, however, when com­prehension was defined as CMR-R scores (requiring no verbal expression). Therefore, racial differences in performance might lie in the decoding por­tion of the process, and in differences in linguistic background between at least some African-American juveniles and the white juvenile sample.

critique. Little is known empirically about the relation of the CMR- R to indexes of psychological development and experience of juveniles and adults, compared to information available on the CMR. Its stronger relation to the CMR than to IQ scores, however, does provide evidence that it assesses an ability concept specific to the understanding of Miranda warning content, not merely general intellectual capacity. Further, the relation between the CMR and CMR-R supports the use of these two instruments together in order to examine similarities and differences in an examinee's performance errors on the two measures. This type of com­parison may be useful in providing multimethod evidence for an exami­nee's misunderstanding of particular elements in the Miranda warnings, and may be useful in detecting inconsistencies in errors. Inconsistencies might be evidence of examinee confusion and anxiety or might suggest attempts to feign ignorance (but without ability to maintain dissimulation across different response modes).

Predictive or Classificatory Utility

There have been no studies of the relation of CMR-R scores to actual responses of juveniles or adults at the time of a police request for waiver of rights to silence and legal counsel, or to indexes of understanding obtained at the time of rights waiver in actual police interrogation situations. Further, no studies have examined the relation of these scores to independent judg­ments (e.g., by judges or attorneys) concerning individuals competency to waive Miranda rights or to understand Miranda warnings.

critique. CMR-R scores obtained at some time after police interro­gation and rights waiver cannot be used as an empirical definition of understanding at the time of the interrogation event. Inferences of this type would require additional information, discussed in the last section of this chapter.

Potential for Expressing Person-Situation Congruency

Potentials here are the same as those discussed under this heading for the CMR (see preceding review).

References

(a) Fulero, S., & Everington, C. (1995). Assessing competency to waive Miranda rights in defendants with mental retardation. Law and Human Behavior, 19, 533-543.

(b) Grisso, T. (1981). Juveniles' waiver of rights: Legal and psychological competence. New York: Plenum Press.

(c) Grisso, T. (1998b). Instrumentsfor assessing understanding and appreciation of Miranda rights. Sarasota, FL: Resource Press.

Comprehension of Miranda Vocabulary (CMV)

Author

Grisso, T.

Author Affiliation

Department of Psychiatry, University of Massachusetts Medical School

Primary Reference

Grisso, T. (1998). Instruments for Assessing Understanding and Appreciation of Miranda Rights. Sarasota, FL: Professional Resource Press

Description

The Comprehension of Miranda Vocabulary (CMV) was developed as a companion instrument for the CMR and CMR-R (previous reviews) to assist in the assessment of juveniles' and adults' understanding of Miranda warnings concerning the rights to silence and legal counsel. Whereas the CMR and CMR-R assess understanding of the overall message conveyed by the standard Miranda warnings, the CMV was intended to assess examinees' understanding of specific words within the warnings. Thus it might provide information with which to interpret errors in an individ­ual's responses on the other two measures (b).

The CMV is administered with the aid of a "flip-chart," desk-top easel that shows examinee stimuli on the side facing the examinee and adminis­tration instructions on the side facing the examiner (c). The CMV requires that examinees be presented with six specific words taken from the stan­dard wording of the four Miranda warnings (see Description in the CMR review): consult, attorney, interrogation, appoint, entitled, and right. A word appears on the easel page facing the examinee, along with a sen­tence in which the word is used (e.g., "Entitled: He is entitled to the money.”). The examiner reads the word and the sentence aloud to the examinee, who is then asked to give the meaning of the word. The manual specifies certain conditions in which further inquiry may be made to allow the examinee to elaborate or clarify the response.

Each response is scored 2 (adequate), 1 (questionable), or 0 (inade­quate) according to scoring criteria and examples provided for each CMV stimulus word (c) (very similar to the criterion format for the Vocabulary subtest of the Wechsler intelligence tests). Total CMV scores can range from 0 to 12. Results may be examined for the nature of specific errors, and scores may be compared to the performance of juvenile and adult samples in the research study for which the instrument was developed.

Conceptual Basis

concept definition. Unlike the CMR and CMR-R, the CMV was not intended to assess understanding of the Miranda warnings, but under­standing of specific words within the warnings. It is possible that a person may understand the individual words within a message yet misunder­stand a message that employs those words. Conversely, one can some­times understand a message without understanding the meaning of each of its words outside the context of the message. Therefore, although the CMV was expected to have some relation to the "comprehension of Miranda rights" concept, it was conceptualized primarily as an adjunct instrument with which to explain or account for CMR errors, not as a measure to be used alone.

operational definition. The six words of the CMV were chosen from among a larger number appearing in the standard Miranda warn­ings, primarily by eliminating words that were defined adequately by almost all juveniles in pilot studies. The general format for administration and scoring (except for use of the words in a sentence) was borrowed from the Vocabulary subtest of the Wechsler intelligence scales. Specific scoring criteria were the product of decisions made by a team of psychol­ogists and legal professionals in juvenile law, with a second review process by a national panel of lawyers experienced in juvenile law and juvenile court work (b).

critique. The ability to define vocabulary words is a conceptual com­ponent of many measures of general intelligence. For this reason, the CMV might be perceived as a conceptual link between the three comprehension of Miranda rights measures (CMR, CMR-R, CMV), which share a similar content, and the more general psychological construct of intellectual capac­ity. If this assumption is supported in construct validation research (see fol­lowing), then the CMV may play an important role in interpreting overall Miranda comprehension results in assessments with this purpose.

Development of the scoring procedure manifests adequate attention to legal consensus regarding adequacy or inadequacy of responses. Unlike the CMR scoring system, which may be employed with somewhat different wordings of Miranda warnings that might be found in various jurisdictions, the CMV scoring system can be employed only with the words that were chosen for the measure. This will restrict its use in some jurisdictions.

Psychometric Development

standardization. The administration procedure is highly standard­ized and clearly described in the manual, including specific limits on inquiry concerning vague responses.

reliability. Test-retest stability of CMV scores is not known. Interrater reliability is reported as r =.97 to.98 for total CMV scores, with correlations in the.90s for individual items, using pairs of trained (experi­enced and inexperienced) scorers (b). In another study with mentally retarded adults, interrater agreement was reported as "above 90%" (a).

norms. Normative data are available in the form of CMV results with the large samples of juveniles and adults described in "Psychometric Development" in the previous review of the CMR. Individuals' CMV scores may be compared to those of normative groups of similar age-by- IQ classification (b, c).

critique. Interpretation of CMV scores must take into account the lack of information concerning test-retest stability of scores. Interrater agreement, on the other hand, is exceptionally good, suggesting the potential for highly objective scoring despite the need or some degree of discretionary judgment in application of the scoring criteria. The avail­ability of normative tables are helpful in clinical application of the CMV.

Construct Validation

CMV items were intercorrelated to a relatively low degree (r =.14-.47) in a juvenile sample, but correlated substantially with total CMV scores (r =.51-.72) (b). CMV scores correlated substantially with CMR scores (r =.67) among juveniles.

In the research study for which the CMV was developed (b), CMV scores of juveniles were significantly related to IQ scores (r =.59) and to age (r =.34), both of which contributed significant sources of variance independently in analyses of variance. CMV scores were not related to amount of prior experience with the justice system. Among adults, CMV scores were related significantly to IQ, but not to age.

CMV performance was significantly poorer for juveniles overall than for adults, but with the 16-year-old group generally achieving a mean CMV score closely approximating that of adult age groups of similar IQ. Adults with mental retardation performed on average substantially more poorly on the CMV than did adults in the original sample (a).

critique. The substantial relation (r =.67) between CMV and CMR scores probably reflects in part the similarity in their content and suggests that they tap a particular knowledge construct in common. On the other hand, the CMV was related more closely to IQ (r =.59) than to the CMR (r =.47), suggesting that CMV performance may bear a greater relation to general intelligence (as a construct defined by IQ tests) than does CMR performance. The CMV, therefore, may have interpretive value as a conceptual link between the general psychological construct of intelligence and the specific ability construct of comprehension of Miranda rights.

In general, CMV performances at various ages and IQ levels appear to be consistent with what would be predicted based on psychological notions of cognitive development in early adolescence and beyond. In fact, it may be more sensitive to cognitive development than to experience variables; for example, the CMV did not manifest a relation between amount of prior experience with police (prior arrests) and comprehension of Miranda content, which was found with the CMR.

As in the other Miranda comprehension measures, the CMV provides no particular safeguard for detecting dissimulation. On the other hand, it may be useful in detecting dissimulation by employing it with its com­panion measures to examine consistencies and inconsistencies across tests in the kinds of errors made by an examinee.

Predictive and Classificatory Utility

As with the other Miranda comprehension measures, no studies have been developed to examine the relation of CMV scores to understanding at the time of actual arrest and rights waiver or to judicial opinions con­cerning juveniles' competence to waive rights knowingly, intelligently, and voluntarily.

critique. Currently the CMV does not provide empirical evidence with which to make inferences about examinees' abilities at the time of prior encounters between the examinee and police officers. Inferences of this type must use additional information, to be discussed in the last sec­tion of this chapter.

Potential for Expressing Person-Situation Congruency

The format of the CMV would not seem to make it amenable to modi­fication in jurisdictions in which police officers use warnings containing different words than those in the standardized CMV. Current scoring crite­ria might not be suited to accurate scoring of responses to different words.

References

(a) Fulero, S., & Everington, C. (1995). Assessing competency to waive Miranda rights in defendants with mental retardation. Law and Human Behavior, 19, 533-543.

(b) Grisso, T. (1981). Juveniles' waiver of rights: Legal and psychological competence. New York: Plenum Press.

(c) Grisso, T. (1998b). Instruments for assessing understanding and appreciation ofMiranda rights. Sarasota, FL: Resource Press.

Function of Rights in Interrogation (FRI)

Author

Grisso, T.

Author Affiliation

Department of Psychiatry, University of Massachusetts Medical School

Primary Reference

Grisso, T. (1998b). Instruments for Assessing Understanding and Appreciation ofMiranda Rights. Sarasota, FL: Professional Resource Press

Description

Function of Rights in Interrogation (FRI) was developed as a research and clinical instrument to assess one‘s perceptions of the function and sig­nificance of rights to silence and legal counsel in the arrest and adjudica­tion process. Three other measures developed in the same research project (a) examined one's understanding of the rights in the Miranda warnings (see CMR, CMR-R, and CMV reviewed previously in this chapter). In con­trast, the FRI was intended to assess one's beliefs about how the rights function and what their importance might be to the juvenile or criminal court defendant.

The FRI is organized according to three content areas, each of which focuses on the relationship between a criminal or juvenile defendant and various persons or events that defendants typically encounter in the jus­tice system. The three areas comprise three subscales of the FRI:

1. Nature of Interrogation: one's perceptions concerning the roles of police and suspects in interrogations

2. Right to Counsel: one's perceptions of the roles of attorneys and suspects in attorney/client relationships

3. Right to Silence: one's perceptions of the power of the right to silence, especially the degree to which it limits the discretionary power of legal authorities (e.g., police, judges)

The FRI is administered with the aid of a "flip-chart," desk-top easel that shows examinee stimuli on the side facing the examinee and admin­istration instructions on the side facing the examiner (b). The FRI stimuli consist of four pictures, corresponding hypothetical vignettes (hereafter, "stories")/ and 15 questions (5 for each of the 3 subscales).

Picture 1 depicts a suspect and two police officers at a table in a bare room. The accompanying story, read aloud by the examiner, explains:

This is a picture about a boy/man named Joe. The policemen in the picture have brought Joe into the detention/police station. There has been a crime. The policemen want to talk to Joe. Remember that Joe is in detention/police station and the policemen want to talk to him/her. (b)

The examinee then is asked five questions relating to the "Nature of Interrogation" subscale (e.g., "What is it that the policemen will want Joe to do?" "How is Joe probably feeling?").

Picture 2 shows a suspect seated with a lawyer, and the story identi­fies this as a meeting between the suspect and the suspect's lawyer prior to questioning by police. Four questions related to the "Right to Counsel" subscale are asked (e.g., "What is the main job of the lawyer?" "While he is talking with his lawyer, what is Tim supposed to do?"). Picture 3 is another interrogation scene with three questions related to the "Right to Silence" subscale (e.g., "Finish this sentence: If Greg decides to tell the police about what he did, then the things he says..."). Picture 4 shows a court hearing in process. The story identifies the participants and leads to three questions, one of them relating to "Right to Counsel" and the other two related to "Right to Silence" (e.g., "Greg did not tell the police any­thing about what he did. Here in court, if he were told to talk about what he did that was wrong, will he have to talk about it?").

Scoring criteria for each of the 15 questions provide abstract defini­tions and specific examples of answers that receive 2-, 1-, or 0-point credit. In general, 2-point answers on the "Nature of Interrogation" subscale are those that indicate an appreciation of the suspect's jeopardy; on the "Right to Counsel" subscale, a recognition of the advocacy nature of the attorney/client relationship; and on the "Right to Silence" subscale, a recognition of the irrevocable or absolute power of the right to silence. For example, in the first story, responses to the question "How is Joe feeling" receive 2 points credit if the answer indicates that the examinee recognizes the unpleasantness or danger of the interrogation for the hypo­thetical suspect.

Examinees receive three subscale scores (each ranging from 0-10) and a total FRI score (range = 0-30). Scores may be compared to those of juvenile and adult samples in the research project for which the FRI was developed (a). In general, FRI scores are interpreted as an index of exami­nees' awareness of various aspects of the legal process, without which the perceived importance or significance of the rights to silence and legal counsel might be reduced. Poorer scores, then, suggest that the examinee might not be prepared to weigh the matter of waiver of the rights, even if the examinee appears (on other instruments) to understand the Miranda warnings themselves.

Conceptual Basis

concept definition. Grisso's (a) review of case law for the validity of confessions indicated that some courts examined not only suspects' knowledge of the Miranda rights (which the FRI's companion instruments were intended to assess), but also suspects' awareness of why the rights might be important in the legal process and how they might function in a protective manner in the course of police investigations and prosecution. The FRI was intended to assess this latter awareness. Grisso (a) conceptu­alized this awareness as comprising knowledge of certain aspects of the legal process as well as beliefs about the process. For example, in order to consider meaningfully the waiver of right to counsel, one would need to know that an attorney is supposed to be an advocate, and one would have to believe that an attorney in fact would play that role if one requested an attorney.

The three content areas chosen for the FRI were awareness of the adversarial nature of the suspect-police relationship, the advocacy and cooperative nature of the suspect-attorney relationship, and the irrevoca­ble nature of the right to silence (that is, that the right could not be abridged by legal authorities in the interrogation and adjudication process). These were not construed as comprising a single construct, but merely as representing the content of a domain of knowledge and belief relevant to the law's concern that suspects are aware of the significance of the rights when considering waiver.

operational definition. The use of picture stimuli was intended to augment the examinee's attention to the task, to establish a contextual set for responding, and to avoid the need for more lengthy verbal descrip­tions of the situation in hypothetical vignettes (a). Items for each of the three content areas were developed by a research team of psychologists and lawyers, guided by concerns expressed in past case opinions by courts. Extensive pilot work led to the final selections. Scoring criteria also were developed by the interdisciplinary group and were reviewed by a national panel of six juvenile court judges and juvenile law attorneys, whose suggested revisions were incorporated into the final criteria.

critique. The selection of the three content areas seems logical. The proper attitude within which to consider jeopardy associated with waiver of rights to silence and counsel would seem to include a perception of police as adversary, counsel as friend and confidante, and rights as guar­antees that cannot be rescinded by legal authorities.

On the other hand, these content areas might not cover the range of considerations that would be relevant in individual cases, especially in juvenile cases. For example, do juveniles understand that their probation officer, heretofore perhaps a friendly counselor in whom they could con­fide, might have to adopt a law enforcement officer's adversarial role when they are suspected of reoffending? That is, do they understand that the trust they may have placed in their probation officer could act to their disadvantage if they now made incriminating statements in that relation­ship? Another aspect of jeopardy not covered by the FRI is the suspect's understanding of the potential long-range consequences of waiving rights and making a statement to police. For example, does the individual have a grasp of the possible penalties associated with conviction or adjudica­tion as a consequence of confession?

Despite these questions of content coverage, content relevance seems adequate in light of the procedures used in selecting the content areas and devising test items (e.g., literature and legal review, interdisciplinary research team, legal panel consultation). Further, the use of picture stimuli might be of special help to clinicians when assessing juvenile defendants who may benefit from a more concrete anchor for the response process.

Psychometric Development

standardization. Instructions to examinees, stories, questions, and scoring are described clearly in the manual (b), and they allow little dis­cretion or flexibility by the examiner.

reliability. Interscorer reliability for several pairs of scorers has been reported (a) as r =.71 to 1.00 for the various items, r =.80 to.94 for the various subscales, and r =.94 to.96 for total FRI scores. Test-retest stability of FRI scores has not been examined.

norms. The primary reference and manual provide FRI means and standard deviations for large samples of delinquent adolescents and adult offenders in the original research study (a, b). These samples were drawn from a juvenile detention center and adult halfway houses for offenders in St. Louis County. Means are provided for various age groups, levels of IQ, race, and socioeconomic status.

critique. Research is needed to determine the stability of FRI scores, because their use in making inferences about an examinee's abilities at the time of rights waiver requires empirical evidence that FRI scores do not fluctuate greatly across periods of days or a few weeks (the usual time between waiver and clinical assessments to examine waiver competency).

Construct Validation

In the original research study (a), the three FRI subscales did not cor­relate substantially with each other for either juveniles or adults (the high­est intercorrelation being r =.24 between the second and third subscales, for juveniles). Correlations between total FRI scores and the three sub­scale scores for juveniles were.48,.63, and.83, respectively, and for adults were.36,.59, and.83. The first subscale's lower relationship to total FRI scores apparently was due to extreme homogeneity of scores on the first subscale (Nature of Interrogation), most research participants having obtained very high scores on this subscale.

Total FRI scores and subscale scores correlated minimally with CMR, CMR-R and CMV scores (see earlier reviews), the correlations ranging from.05 to.27, Age was significantly related to FRI scores among adoles­cents, but not among adults; further, all adolescent age groups performed significantly more poorly on the FRI than did the adult group (a). An age- by-IQ interaction, however, indicated that differences between juveniles and adults were most pronounced at lower IQ levels, with juveniles of higher IQ differing little in FRI scores from adults with similar IQ scores. FRI scores were significantly and positively related to juveniles' amount of prior experience with courts (as indicated by number of prior felony referrals) when statistical analyses controlled for IQ.

critique. The lack of substantial correlations between subscales of the FRI suggests that the three subscales are relatively independent of each other in terms of their content; therefore, the FRI does not appear to assess any single construct. Further, the FRI does not relate substantially to the Miranda comprehension measures (CMR, CMR-R, CMV), which themselves have substantial intercorrelations (see earlier reviews). This finding is consistent with the author's expectations that individuals who understand Miranda warnings may or may not be aware of the function and significance of Miranda rights.

In general, research results with the FRI are consistent with expectations based on theory and empirical information about cognitive development and knowledge acquisition at adolescent ages. More research is needed, however, to examine the relation of FRI scores to developmental indexes in samples other than those employed in the research project for which the instrument was developed.

Predictive or Classificatory Utility

There have been no studies of the relation of FRI scores to actual responses of juveniles or adults to police requests for waiver of silence and legal counsel. Further, no studies have examined the relation of these scores to independent judgments (e.g., by judges or lawyers) concerning individuals' competency to waive Miranda rights.

critique. Currently there is no empirical evidence with which to make inferences based on FRI data concerning examinees' understanding of the function of rights at the time of prior encounters between the exam­inee and police officers.

Potential for Expressing Person-Situation Congruency

Several situational circumstances might be relevant when comparing an individual's degree of appreciation of the function of Miranda rights to the degree of appreciation required by a specific waiver case. For example, a case in which police officers played an especially benign and friendly role (e.g., as a strategy to obtain cooperation from the suspect) would seem to demand a more firm awareness by the suspect of the adversarial nature of the suspect-police relationship, in order to be ade­quately prepared to consider the consequences of rights waiver and a con­fession. In contrast, the presence of a truly supportive and knowledgeable friend or adult to advise the suspect during the rights waiver process would seem to decrease the demand for personal knowledge or belief represented by the FRI. The FRI itself, of course, does not assess these situational demand variables, nor are there other systematic methods for doing so.

References

(a) Grisso, T. (1981). Juveniles' waiver of rights: Legal and psychological competence. New York: Plenum Press.

(b) Grisso, T. (1998). Instrumentsfor assessing understanding and appreciation of Miranda rights. Sarasota, FL: Resource Press.