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students from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and most of them lived in the far reaches of almost suburbia with their parents. I guessed from the fact that I was expected to sit with them that our roles at the court clinic would not diverge.I had finished all of my doctoral course work, for God’s sake, and yet here I was stuck beside the master’s students. It felt like a demotion.
    With the arrival of Dr. Wolfe my mood improved. I said hello and reintroduced myself, reminding him that we’d met the previous winter when he’d interviewed me. He said he remembered and welcomed me to the court clinic before announcing to the group that he would be teaching the Tuesday seminar, which was apparently a weekly occurrence. That morning he would talk about the history of the fitness to stand trial.
    Forensic psychology textbooks trace the idea of fitness to stand trial back to seventeenth-century England. In those days, criminal defendants who refused to respond to the charges against them were given a sort of pretrial during which a jury would decide whether they were “mute of malice” or “mute by visitation of God.” The first verdict decreed them willfully obstreperous and was met with physical punishment that could end only upon response to the charges or death. The second initially applied to the physiologically deaf and mute but was eventually broadened to include the lunatic. The lunatic, forgiven his silence, was exempt from torture.
    While the textbooks talked about the seventeenth century, Dr. Wolfe explained that he located the origins of competency in the year 200 and the Talmudic concept of the
shoteh
. The
shoteh
displayed disorganized thinking and behavior. He was exempt from following Jewish law, could not enter into a contract, and was exonerated from punishment. With the establishment of the United States, similar ideas came to be loosely reflected in the Constitution, not only to preserve the rights of the individual, but also to avoid making a mockeryof the court system, whose players and tasks would certainly lose dignity in the process of trying someone quite obviously out of his mind.
    The rights guaranteed criminal defendants by the Constitution had been fleshed out over time, and so, too, the definition of fitness to stand trial. The U.S. Supreme Court, Dr. Wolfe told us, established the modern-day competency standard in 1960 with
Dusky v. United States
. Milton Dusky—a thirty-three-year-old chronic schizophrenic accused of being an accessory to the kidnapping and rape of a teenage girl—was initially deemed competent by a judge whose own standard was simply that a defendant be oriented to person, time, and place (that is, know who he is, when it is, and where he is). The justices later overturned Dusky’s conviction on the grounds that this judge’s idea of fitness was incomplete and that Dusky, whose psychiatrist had observed that he was unable “to interpret reality from unreality,” had not indeed been fit to stand trial. The Court established that “the test must be whether [the defendant] has sufficient present ability to consult with his lawyer with a reasonable degree of rational understanding—and whether he has a rational as well as factual understanding of the proceedings against him.” Once treated and found fit according to these standards, Dusky was retried and reconvicted, though with a much lighter sentence the second time around.
    Dr. Wolfe told us that in 1974 the New York courts had elaborated on the
Dusky
standard, requiring that a defendant meet six basic criteria in order to be found fit. The first three were relatively easy to ascertain. A defendant must know who he is, where he is, and when it is, or be, as the jargon goes, “oriented in all spheres.” He must be able to perceive, recall, and relate—to communicate effectively about his life and theworld and about the charges against him. He must be able to understand the role of the court principals