Judges to be trained to spot signs of dementia in criminal defendants
Lawyer devises training course after rise in petty crime cases involving older people with clean records
JUDGES will be trained to spot signs of dementia in defendants, amid a rise in the number of hitherto law-abiding citizens charged with petty crimes.
Mark Hatzer, 53, a senior personal injury solicitor at Slater and Gordon who also sits as a deputy district judge, has devised a course to help judges identify signs of Alzheimer’s disease.
He is working with the Alzheimer’s Society to educate his colleagues about the illness and to “flag up potential risks” of injustices being carried out.
Mr Hatzer, based in Manchester, is drawing on personal experience as he is the main carer for his 83-year- old mother, Sylvia, who was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s four years ago. He came up with the idea for a training course after noticing cases where people with an otherwise clean record have found themselves before the courts for minor misdemeanours due to the early onset of dementia, which at the time had not yet been detected.
Mr Hatzer noticed a rise in the number of cases where people with an unblemished record were walking out of supermarkets without paying for groceries, or were wasting police time.
He said that dementia can make people of a previously “placid” nature become “quite violent” because it can alter their personality, with “memory problems” being the “trademark of the dementia sufferer”.
“They may find themselves in the criminal justice system and at risk of suddenly having a criminal record,” he told The Daily Telegraph.
“Often, due to a lack of legal aid funding, they will try and represent themselves, and if a judge has a busy court list and they’re under pressure to get through it, if someone offers a guilty plea, they may accept it unquestioningly. They need to be alerted to the warning signs and we should flag that this person potentially acted out of character.”
According to the Alzheimer’s Society, there are around 850,000 people with dementia in the UK and 209,600 people will develop the disease this year (the equivalent of one person every three minutes).
Danielle Freeman, community fundraiser with the charity, said: “With an ageing population and the incidence of dementia ever increasing, it’s extremely important that people are trained on how to identify the behaviours associated with dementia so that vulnerable people are dealt with appropriately and are supported.”
The roll-out of the course, entitled “Enhancing Awareness in Relation to Frontotemporal Dementia”, has been delayed because of the pandemic, but should the delays continue, Mr Hatzer will look at offering a digital version.