Legal News

New project tries to integrate neuroscience into the legal system

By Jason Siegel

If you want to prove a client's innocence, trying reading their mind. Recent breakthroughs in neuroscience show potential to do just that, finds an article in this month's California Bar Journal.

One of the inventions highlighted was Carnegie Mellon University's functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine that displays and analyzes blood flow and changing oxygen   levels in the brain.

Hoping to determine how courts deal with these breakthroughs in neuroscience (in terms of guilt, innocence, punishment, bias, etc.) the MacArthur Foundation paid $10 million to start the Law and Neuroscience Project at the University of California Santa Barbara .

The leader of the project, Stanford law professor Hank Greely, told the CA Bar Journal to be cautious and skeptical about recent studies that claim devices can accurately distinguish fact from fiction. But they shouldn't be ignored, said Greely.

Even if it works, no one's going to spend the money for the test unless the courts approve the procedure, Michael Begovich, the deputy public defender in San Diego County and vice chair of the state bar's criminal law group, told the CA Bar Journal.

"There's also the ethics of the project to account for," Michael Gazzaniga, the neuroscientist directing the Law and Neuroscience project, told The Scientific American in a podcast last November. (LISTEN)

If brain imaging was able to accurately determine someone mental state, "will that be a violation of your personal rights? Is that something that one would call the Fifth Amendment?," asked Gazzaniga. Physical evidence like DNA is allowed but the Fifth Amendment applies to verbal self-incrimination. "Are we going to have all these new capacities develop out of the scientific end and then the courts are going to have to decide, should we call these physical evidence?you know, it's the substrate of mind? Or is this mental evidence and therefore unusable in a court of law? Those are all uncharted waters because the science of the brain enabling mental life isn't quite there yet."

"Experts study neuroscience use in the courts," Associated Press

Full post as published by Legal Pad | LA on March 05, 2008 (boomark / email).