The use of civil commitment for postprison confinement of sex offenders represents a quintessential example of a poorly conceived scheme designed to unify concepts from the fields of law and medicine. Legislators supporting such programs attempted to utilize the authority of mental health professionals to lend credence to legal regimes on shaky doctrinal ground. The result has been a set of programs that fail from both a medical and legal standpoint. These laws also place lawyers and medical practitioners in difficult ethical positions when they become involved in sex offender commitment cases. Among the many ethical, moral, and legal complications of civil commitment of sex offenders are the co-optation of medical authority to legitimate commitment based upon nonmedical classifications, ex post facto application of civil commitment statutes to offenders who committed crimes decades earlier, admissibility of treatment records during a civil commitment hearing, and the likelihood of lifetime commitment that results from a finding of future dangerousness.
Language: en
LA - en SN - 1937-7010 UR - http://dx.doi.org/10.1001/virtualmentor.2013.15.10.pfor2-1310 ID - ref1 ER -