Tagged: brain science

More on Brain Scans – Can They Tell Whether You’ll Get Off Lightly?

With a hat tip to our Uncle Ralph, here’s a link to yet another fMRI study bearing on criminal law. Makiko Yamada and colleagues have published in Nature Communications their study “Neural Circuits in the Brain that are Activated when Mitigating Criminal Sentences.” The researchers asked people to review the...

Not Ready for Prime Time: Brain-Scan Reliability in Question

Almost from our first post, we’ve written here about developments in brain-scan technology and its applicability to criminal law (see here, here, here and here, for example). So needless to say, the past nine days have been of great interest, as the research behind neuroimaging’s claims has come into hot...

The Science of Ethical Relativism?

If you’re looking to start an argument with a loved one, or a fight, moral relativism is an excellent way to start. Specifically the position that, because different people do have different ideas of what is and is not ethical, your loved one’s morals are not true. Nor are they...

A Neat Primer on Neuroscience and Criminal Law

  One of our favorite topics here at the Criminal Lawyer has been the interaction of brain science and criminal law. So it’s with a pleased tip of the hat to Mark Bennett that we have the video linked above, an excellent summary of modern neuroscience as it applies to...

Using Neuroscience to Gauge Mens Rea?

Over at Edge, in a short video, we get an intriguing look at criminal justice from the perspective of neurological science. Put all this together, as you can see here, and we discover little areas that are brighter than others. And this is all now easily done, as everyone knows,...

Thought Police?

Guilt or innocence, one might say, is all in the mind. After all, there are very few crimes that can be committed without the requisite mens rea, or mental state. If we’re going to punish someone, their acts cannot have been mere accident. We want to know that they had...