Profiling or Guessing- the role of criminal profiling is certainly one in the popular press and media. Television shows such as CSI or Bones bring the task of forensics into the mainstream living room, but these shows tend to focus more on the sexier forms of criminology as opposed to the gray area of forensic psychology. A professional forensic psychologist, though, understands that a typical profile is not meant to be an exact science -- for example, white male, middle age, college educated, frustrated at work, may have had social adjustment issues while an adolescent -- we have just described both a typical serial killer as well as eighty percent of American males born between 1955-1970. Similarly, psychological autopsies, like forensic evaluations tend to be more narrowly focused, interested more in accuracy of events than supposition. For example, often suicides are cases in which a psychological autopsy would be conducted in order to assess some reasons behind the suicide as opposed to the more clinical cause of death.
Sanity Determination -- One of the major roles of the contemporary forensic psychologist is to ascertain the psychological health of a subject as to their ability to understand the legal process, whether they were legally sane when the crime in question was committed, and whether they know the intellectual and societal definition of right and wrong. Often, the advanced sociopathic personality is able to mask responses in standardized psychological tests -- they are bright enough, studied enough, to fool the test and therefore invalidate basic tests. Thus, the task of the forensic psychologist is to remove those barriers and focus on the actual pathology of the subject in question; which is not only difficult, but never completely definable.
The Dark Side -- Dealing with deviant behaviors is also one of the tasks of the forensic psychologist....
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