I'm working on a story with a legal subplot now, an expansion of my story "Free" from the latest mixtape. One of the main characters was infected with slave nanites that changed him into a woman and made her imprint on the first person she saw (his partner; they were police officers trying to arrest a slaver) as her master. The psychologists and psychiatrists at the hospital recommend she be declared incompetent and be assigned a guardian.
I've found a little information about competency hearings online, but it's a little too vague to help me much in actually writing the competency hearing scene, and most of it deals with criminal competency hearings (is a defendant sane enough to stand trial, or should they go to a mental institution). Is a competency hearing for in impaired person who may need a guarian adversarial, like a criminal or civil case? With the lawyer for the person whose competency is in question going up against a lawyer for the person who is petitioning to be assigned as their guardian, cross-examining the psychiatrists and people who know the person and the person whose competence is in question themselves? What if the person in question and their closest friends think they're still capable of taking care of themselves, maybe with a little help, but the doctors think they aren't?
If anyone with legal knowledge can answer questions or beta-read the story, let me know.
Comments
Background?
Since your story background apparently includes rather sophisticated nano-technology, there are going to be a lot of other changes in the way society works. To give an example, in one of my major story arcs (no TG, so it's not posted here) there is a character whose brain failed to reconfigure itself properly when she transitioned from childhood to adulthood, so she describes herself as 23 going on 12.
The story background has something called the "verifier," which can tell whether someone is telling the truth --- as ce sees it --- or whether ce's shading the truth or outright lying or bullshitting. This is a standard piece of the background, that is used in all court hearings and contract negotiations. The board simply requested all the evidence and testimony it needed, considered it and made a ruling. The board members had to testify under verification that they considered all the evidence and didn't have any outside influence.
While you can arm-wave the way the technology works, the consequences of that technology have to be carefully considered or it's simply going to look like a deus-ex-machina.
So my advice is to simply write it the way you think it ought to work in the society you're envisioning.
Future/alternate legal system
I'm not yet sure if this is set in a near future or an alternate history; I think the latter, but it wouldn't take a lot of editing to make it the former. I know there are some differences in the legal system, but I don't see any reason why competency hearings (the kind used for non-criminal defendants suffering senility or mental illness) would be fundamentally different than they are here and now. There is an additional reason why people might need to be declared incompetent and assigned a guardian (infection by inimical nanites), but the procedure for doing so would probably be about the same as for a senile or mentally ill person.
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One Perry Mason Novel...
...started out with a contested competency hearing. It seemed to be a standard adversarial process, a civil case with the potential conservators taking the stand along with a psychiatrist they hired, and Mason ripping the shrink to shreds in cross-examination before calling his own set of relatives and professional(s).. No jury; the judge would decide.
From what I've read elsewhere, I think that's the standard "family law" style when there's a disagreement. Since the hearing's before a judge who can decide for himself what evidence to consider, there's less need for objections to testimony, and the judge can participate to a greater degree than he would at a jury trial.
(The book was written 50 or 60 years ago; it seems that the psychiatrist based his argument in part on Mason's client having an "arcus senilis", a colored ring around the cornea of the eyes that -- as the name implies -- is usually age-related and had once been considered a likely sign of senility. Mason, anticipating that, had arranged to have the case heard by a judge who had that condition as well and knew very well that the argument wasn't valid.)
Erle Stanley Gardner, who wrote the series, was a trial attorney himself, so his description of procedure was probably realistic, at least at the time.
Eric