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...
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...
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...
We’ve written about the lie-detector uses of fMRI exams before (see here and here).
Now it looks like Brooklyn attorney David Zevin is trying to get it introduced for the first time in a real life court case. (The previous attempt, aimed at using it during sentencing in a San Diego case, was later withdrawn.) It’s an employer-retaliation case, which has devolved into a “he-said/she-said stalemate.” Zevin’s client says she stopped getting good assignments after she complained about sexual harassment. A co-worker says he heard the supervisor give that order, and the supervisor says he never did. So at Zevin’s request, the co-worker underwent an fMRI to see if he’s telling the truth when he says he heard that order.
Needless to say, there is opposition to letting this kind of evidence come in. There’s a pretty good discussion of the whole thing, believe it or not, over at Wired.
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In October, we reported that functional magnetic resonance imaging (better known as fMRI) is being touted as an honest-to-goodness lie detector. Unlike a polygraph, which required interpretation of physical bodily reactions, an fMRI looks at real-time brain activity to see if brain areas associated with lying are activated during any...
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...
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