Gedragsdeskundigen en juristen in het strafrecht

Behavioral experts and law practitioners in criminal law: Do we understand one another? Legal insanity, criminal responsibility and dangerousness are concepts that connect fundamental law concepts about human nature, guilt, blame and punishment to psychomedical knowledge about mental disorders that may deprive rational understanding or acting. These issues has raised serious debates among medical, psychology and law professionals for over decades, and across the world. In the Netherlands, the criterion and/or conditions under which mental illness may lead to legal insanity was unspecified, until the Dutch Supreme Court recently formulated some specifications in the case of ‘Thijs H.’. There is however still much room to debate; among the behavioral discipline and the criminal law practitioners, but also interdisciplinary. This contribution describes the main areas debated in a large multidisciplinary meeting of 200 psychiatrists, psychologists, judges, prosecutors and lawyers, in September 2024 in Rotterdam.