Investigators from University of California Berkeley Have Reported New Data on Delirium (Excited Delirium, Policing, and the Law of Evidence).

The article focuses on the legal and medical implications of the diagnosis of excited delirium in the context of police use of force and deaths in custody. Researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, highlight that excited delirium, a psychiatric condition characterized by extreme agitation, has been used in legal settings to absolve law enforcement from liability in cases of in-custody deaths. Despite its frequent use in court, the medical community has found little evidence supporting the existence of excited delirium since its introduction in the 1980s. The study examines how federal courts treat this diagnosis as an evidentiary matter, revealing that legal doctrine can transform contested medical concepts into accepted facts, thereby obscuring potential unreasonable uses of force by police. [Extracted from the article]