Virginia Cooper Summary

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In the research study conducted by Virginia G. Cooper and Patricia A. Zapf, they are looking to come up with potential accurate diagnosis guidelines for declaring if someone is competent or incompetent when coming to their ability to stand trial. This is something they are evaluating, because there are many individuals each year sent for “competency evaluations” and there are no procedures set up from ”the courts for making a competency evaluation” (424). They are hoping to find out what factors reliably determine competency.
Cooper and Zapf are specifically looking for potential prejudices of “clinicians” rulings of “468 criminal defendants” from “Taylor Hardin Secure Medical Facility in 1994 to 1997” on their “competency” by analyzing the

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