Ethics

MICHAEL L. PERLIN, New York Law School
The robust debate over neuroimaging has highlighted a series of law-and-policy questions dealing primarily with reliability, admissibility and availability. When we consider the topic that I will be addressing in this paper - the impact of this evidence on juror decision-making in insanity defense cases - we need to recalibrate our focus so as to incorporate other questions that are as essential (most likely, more essential) to the resolution of the underlying dilemma: (1) to what extent will such evidence - apparently, less inherently easy to falsify- have on jurors whose inherent suspicion of mental state opinion testimony is well-documented, (2) will this "falsifiability" issue even matter to jurors whose personal values/moral codes reject the motion of any non-responsibility verdict because it is dissonant with their heuristics-driven false "ordinary common sense," (3) will there now be some shred of truth in one of the standard insanity defense myths (that the insanity defense is a "rich man's ploy"); that is, will the "rich and famous" be able to disproportionately rely on neuroimaging testimony in their trials?, (4) to what extent will sanism and pretextuality drive juror behavior in such cases, and (5) what are the therapeutic jurisprudence implications of the answers to all of these questions?

This presentation will address - though it cannot fully answer - all of these questions in the hopes that other legal scholars will be stimulated to consider them each in depth in the future.