Postmortem Combined Psychological and Psychiatric Forensic Expertise in Cases of Juvenile Suicide

Abstract

The subject of the research is the postmortem combined psychological and psychiatric forensic expertise in cases of juvenile suicide. The authors reveal the legal basis for conducting examinations of this type; the content of complexity signs; the specifics of the subject of forensic psychological, forensic psychiatric and combined forensic psychological and psychiatric expert examinations. They point out that the expertise under consideration is a necessary stage of investigation of criminal cases on a number of articles of the Criminal code of the Russian Federation, and the quality of the examination is directly related to truth-seeking and that this statement fully applies to criminal cases on the facts of juvenile suicide. In order to study the practice of setting and carrying out the expertise of this type in cases of juvenile suicide, the authors studied 30 acts of postmortem examinations obtained by random sampling. The article presents the analysis of typical questions that were put to the experts, and the recommendations on the optimal formulation of these questions in order to fully identify the circumstances that are important for the cases. The authors note that the situation is unsatisfactory when the complexity of the postmortem forensic psychological and psychiatric expertise, in fact, is replaced by a set of two examinations: psychological and psychiatric.