William Connor Darby, M.D. is the Training Director of the UCLA Forensic Psychiatry Fellowship Program, Co-Chair of the Disruptive Behavior Committee for the Greater Los Angeles VA Healthcare System, and Director of the Forensic Clinic at the West Los Angeles VA Hospital. He is a Health Sciences Clinical Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences of the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.

He received his undergraduate degree from Swarthmore College in psychobiology, and his medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania (Perlman School of Medicine). He completed his adult psychiatry residency and forensic psychiatry fellowship training at UCLA. He is double board certified in General Psychiatry and Forensic Psychiatry.

He is the current president of the American Society for Adolescent Psychiatry (ASAP). Additionally, he is a corresponding member for the Council on Psychiatry and the Law for the American Psychiatric Association (APA), councilor and chair of the ethics and judicial action committees for the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law (AAPL), and Laughlin fellow and member of the American College of Psychiatrists.

He has received numerous awards including the Rappeport Fellowship by the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law (AAPL), the Laughlin Fellowship by the American College of Psychiatrists (ACP), the UCLA Outstanding Teaching Award, and the Howard Zonana Award for Best Teacher in a Forensic Fellowship Program by AAPL. His writings have been recognized with three Shirley Hatos Prizes awarded by UCLA.​

Dr. Darby has published articles and book chapters in the areas of Tarasoff (duty to protect), informed consent, ethics, forensic expert role, stimulant use in college students, forensic application of neuroscience and neuroimaging, forensic application of artificial intelligence, the death penalty, psychopathy, diminished responsibility, and mental health law. He lectures nationally and internationally on his research interests including topics of psychiatric and forensic ethics, capital punishment, assisted outpatient treatment, Tarasoff, combatting bias in forensic work, criminal responsibility for persons with dementia, fitness for duty evaluations for doctorate level professionals, violence risk assessment, malpractice issues in mental health, college mental health, psychiatric liability issues for universities, informed consent, stimulant use in college populations, ethical application of neuroimaging and neuroscience as a forensic expert, among others.  To address ethics issues in forensic and general psychiatry, Dr. Darby and Dr. Weinstock have developed the approach of dialectical principlism that they apply in lectures and publications.

Link to website: https://www.los-angeles-psychiatrist.com/

Robert Weinstock MD is the founding director of the UCLA forensic psychiatry fellowship program and current Associate Director. He is Health Sciences Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at UCLA. Dr. Weinstock is a past president of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law (AAPL), Directors of Forensic Psychiatry Fellowships, and the American Society of Adolescent Psychiatry (ASAP). He received the Golden Apple Award from AAPL. He has special interests in ethics and judicial action issues and has chaired the AAPL ethics committee on two separate occasions. He founded and chaired the AAPL geriatric and addictions committees. For many years he was a member of the APA committee on judicial action and chaired the judicial action committee of the California Psychiatric Association. Dr. Weinstock is a member of the AAPL judicial action committee and ethics committee. Dr. Weinstock received training in general and adolescent psychiatry at the McLean Hospital. He is certified in forensic psychiatry and in the past was Director of Treatment at Bridgewater State Hospital. He has published many papers, edited several books, and presented at many national professional meetings. In addition to his work, teaching, and supervising at the West Los Angeles VA Hospital, for many years he also was senior psychiatrist at the Counseling and Psychological Service at UCLA.

Saul J. Faerstein is a clinical psychiatrist and forensic psychiatrist who has been practicing in this community for the past 46 years. Although he is known to members of this bar for his psychiatric-legal work and courtroom testimony, his practice also includes treating patients at his office here in Beverly Hills and teaching at UCLA and Cedars-Sinai.

Dr. Faerstein did his undergraduate studies at Brandeis University from which he received his B.A. degree in 1964. He studied medicine at the New York University School of Medicine and received his M.D. degree in 1968. Following a medical internship at Cedars-Sinai and a psychiatric residency at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, he served as a psychiatrist with the U.S. Army Medical Corps for two years. During that time, he had the opportunity to treat returning POWs from Vietnam and learned first-hand about PTSD. It was during the army experience as a consultant to the Judge Advocate Corps that the seeds of interest in forensic psychiatry were planted.

Dr. Faerstein returned to Los Angeles and completed a post-doctoral fellowship in Psychiatry and the Law at the University of Southern California Institute of Psychiatry and Law under Seymour Pollack, M.D., a giant of American forensic psychiatry and a founder of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law. Upon completion of his fellowship, Dr. Faerstein began his practice of clinical and forensic psychiatry and was appointed Assistant Director of the Forensic Fellowship program at USC and Assistant Professor at the USC School of Medicine. Since 1981 he has been a faculty member of the UCLA School of Medicine and a devoted teacher in the forensic fellowship. He conducts a seminar in the practice of criminal and civil forensic psychiatry, drawing on his extensive experience and his past cases. He is passionate about teaching and mentoring students and fellows.

Dr. Faerstein’s forensic practice includes consultation on both criminal and civil cases. Since his appointment as the prosecution’s expert in the Hillside Strangler case in 1978 he has consulted in many high-profile cases including the Menendez brothers case, the O.J. Simpson case and the Unabomber. On the civil side, he has consulted extensively in a wide variety of issues, with special interest in employment litigation involving emotional distress claims. He has examined plaintiffs with claims of wrongful termination, discrimination based on gender, age and race, and in hundreds of cases of sexual harassment claims. On many of these cases he has testified by deposition and at trial.

Dr. Faerstein is a Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association, elected in 1994 “in recognition of his significant contributions to Psychiatry.” Since 1998, he has been Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at UCLA.

Dr. Thompson is the Director of the Forensic Psychiatry Division of the Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health. In that role, he provides leadership, oversight, and direction for all LACDMH programs designed to address the needs of justice-involved populations across the lifespan. He manages a diverse team responsible for collaborating closely with other agencies, organizations, academic institutions, groups, and individuals in their work to eliminate unnecessary incarceration of those with serious mental illnesses.

He is Board Certified in General Psychiatry, Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, Forensic Psychiatry, and Addiction Medicine. He is also a Certified Correctional Health Professional of the National Commission on Correctional Health Care. He is a Distinguished Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association (APA) and the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (AACAP).

Dr. Thompson completed his General and Child & Adolescent Psychiatry Residencies at UCLA and his Forensic Psychiatry Residency at UC Davis. He is actively involved in organized psychiatry and is a Past President of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law (AAPL), the current President of the California Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry (CALACAP), current Secretary of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences (AAFS), and a prior member of the Board of Directors of this organization. In the past, he served as Co-Chair of the California Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry’s (CALACAP’s) Government Affairs and Advocacy Committee.

Additionally, Dr. Thompson is an Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. He teaches both the forensic and child & adolescent psychiatry fellows. He also gives lectures on child forensic psychiatric topics to second-year child & adolescent psychiatry fellows and forensic psychiatry fellows at the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine.

Dr. Michael MacIntyre graduated from the UCLA forensic psychiatry fellowship in 2020 and has stayed on as the newest faculty member within the program. He lectures frequently and supervises fellows for compensation and pension evaluations, disruptive behavior committee reviews, and Los Angeles County public defender cases. Clinically, Dr. MacIntyre works for the Veterans Affairs Healthcare System of Greater Los Angeles. He works as a general psychiatrist in the telemental health department and in the forensic division, where he addresses conservatorship issues. Additionally, he maintains a private forensic psychiatry practice and is a court panel forensic psychiatrist for Los Angeles and Sonoma Counties.
He has published on a wide range of areas including reporting laws and physician sexual exploitation, voluntary intoxication and mens rea, physician privacy, and the ethical use of neuroscience and neuroimaging in forensic contexts. Dr. MacIntyre is active in organizational psychiatry, and he currently sits on several committees for the American Association of Psychiatry and the Law (AAPL) and is the current secretary for the American Society for Adolescent Psychiatry (ASAP).

The forensic fellows receive their clinical training in a wide variety of forensic settings. These rotations include the Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health (DMH), the Greater Los Angeles (GLA) VA Healthcare System, the Los Angeles County Superior Court Expert Witness Panel, the Sonoma County Court, as well as being supervised by faculty on private criminal and civil forensic cases. Forensic fellows will have unique opportunities to work at UCLA Law School

Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health (DMH)

During this rotation, fellows learn unique approaches to treating special correctional patient populations in the Men’s Community Reintegration Clinic, to liaising with judges, attorneys, and other stakeholders in the LA County Mental Health Court, to opining on Felony Mental Health Diversion, violence risk assessments, contested guardianship, and other special forensic evaluations (including juvenile) for the County. Additionally, fellows will evaluate in-custody and out-of-custody defendants for competency to stand trial (CST) where they gain experience interacting with defense attorneys, judges, and the clinical treatment team, learning how to efficiently share their expert opinion and recommendations.

Veterans’ Affairs (VA) Healthcare System

At the VA, fellows perform psychiatric disability evaluations for conditions that are incurred or aggravated during active military service including combat and sexual-trauma related PTSD. The experience teaches fellows the principles of evaluating the severity of psychiatric disability and causation of a mental health condition. These skills are highly useful for future work in civil psychiatric disability, worker’s compensation, psychiatric independent medical exams (IME), sexual abuse and harassment, and psychic harm evaluations.

Fellows serve on the interdisciplinary Disruptive Behavior Committee (DBC) and are involved in assessing potentially unsafe behavior of patients in clinical setting. Evaluations may include record review, discussions with collateral, and interview of the veteran. Skills learned include clinical and structural violence risk assessments. Fellows will learn to make recommendations to mitigate the risk of potential future violence in the workplace setting.
Fellows will also participate with the hospital ethics committee. Cases for fellows will emphasize psychiatric and forensically related ethical dilemmas. Fellows will learn to analyze a case and apply appropriate ethical principles to help the clinical team in management.
VA ethics, forensic, and DBC cases involve record review, discussions with collateral, and write-ups that occur throughout the week and are often virtual.

Sonoma County Superior Court

Under the supervision of former AAPL President Dr. Emily Keram fellows virtually evaluate in-custody and out-of-custody defendants for CST and Sell related issues. They hone report writing skills and prepare reports for legal professionals without additional expertise in mental health, a unique contrast to working in the Los Angeles County Mental Health Court. Fellows have the opportunity to testify in court.

Los Angeles County Court Panel Criminal Evaluations

Fellows will be registered for the expert witness panel for Los Angeles County public defenders. Fellows will be able to participate in criminal cases as a consultant or expert to a public defender, including record review, evaluation of a defendant, and report writing. Fellows perform criminal forensic evaluations on issues of insanity defense, diminished responsibility, sex offender evaluations, sentencing considerations, diversion, among other.

Mock Trial

Fellows participate in mock trial experiences with the UCLA School of Law and Southwestern School of Law. These experiences involve writing a report and testifying with feedback from judges, law professors, and practicing attorneys.

Due to the breadth of UCLA faculty, fellows have had the opportunity to participate in unique experiences such as a death row evaluations at San Quentin, an OIG rebuttal witness case for the federal government, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) case, homicide cases involving affirmative defenses (imperfect self defense, diminished capacity, insanity), among others.

General Didactics

Weekly didactics are provided by a wide cross-section of UCLA faculty.
Topics cover all essential forensic psychiatry topics including forensic ethics, assessment and report writing, risk assessment, assessment of malingering, criminal and civil competencies, criminal responsibility, evaluation of sex offenders, record keeping, duty to warn and mandatory reporting, and more.

Landmark Case Conference

Fellows participate in a weekly conference by Zoom with the forensic psychiatry fellows from UCSF in which they discuss precedent-setting court decisions relevant to mental health and forensic psychiatrist. The course is led by Dr. Alan Newman and David Faigman (Dean of UC Hastings School of Law) providing an opportunity to learn from legal experts and have discussion with fellows outside of the program.

Dr. Faerstein Seminar

Fellows participate in a longitudinal seminar with Dr. Faerstein, a private practice forensic psychiatrist. Dr. Faerstein will review and discuss all major topics in forensic psychiatry from a private practice perspective. Seminar includes a review of many cases and opinions written by Dr. Faerstein.

Fellows will be guided in completing scholarly project(s) with a faculty member mentor. The aim is to produce one or more presentations for national professional meetings and/or publications. Fellows receive guidance on how to teach residents on forensic topics in addition to instruction on how to effectively present forensic material to various audiences (e.g., other psychiatrists, legal professionals, laypersons). Recent fellows have published in multiple journals (including AAPL) and participated in textbook chapters.

Fellows receive an educational stipend towards the AAPL annual meeting and board review course; they are encouraged to attend other professional meetings with protected time when they are presenting or play a role in the organization. All fellows receive the Rosner and Scott Principles and Practice of Forensic Psychiatry textbook.