Does a court have to appoint an expert to assist it in making a dangerousness determination?

expert to assist it in making the determination of dangerousness. (See People v. Stuckey (2009) 175 Cal.App.4th 898, 917 ["'Of course, the trial court is never obliged to appoint an expert to assist it in making a factual, much less a legal, determination under Evidence Code section 730 unless, as that section provides, "it appears to the court . . . that expert evidence is . . . required"'"].) The trial court's references to "broken" brains or personalities were simply colloquial expressions of a difference between dysfunctional behaviors and thought processes, rather than ordinary mental mistakes or miscalculations. The court was not making a medical or psychological diagnosis, as such, but simply noting that defendant's choices of coping mechanismsdenial, minimization, making excuses, resorting to violence, choosing to harm others rather than delay his own desires and gratificationshad not served him well in the past, yet he continued to display the same choices and mechanisms. Defendant's preferences with respect to problem-solving had hurt people in the past, had persisted into the present, and showed every sign of continuing into the future.

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