Abstract
Despite the high legal significance of expert reports on sex offenders, the assessment criteria leave a lot of room for subjective leeway. In order to make the progress of standardized prognosis procedures usable for the assessment of criminal responsibility, Briken and Müller (2014) have proposed using operationalized criteria from established prognosis instruments to assess the criminal responsibility of sex offenders with paraphilic disorders. A long-term goal is to make the assessment process more transparent and comprehensible. In Pilot Study 1, the proposed criteria are examined for the first time for their applicability and reliability using anonymized excerpts from reports. In addition to the inter-rater reliability calculation for all criteria and for the assessment of severe other mental abnormality (SASA) and ability to control oneself, the raters' results are compared with the results of the expert commissioned to provide the report. Due to the inadequate results of Pilot Study 1, the procedure and criteria were revised and checked in a second pilot study. The applicability of the proposed procedure was improved after revisions. Overall, the results of the two pilot studies suggest that the criteria could be helpful in assessing the criminal responsibility of sex offenders.
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