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Experts Study Neuroscience Use in Courts
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Another group is studying research suggesting that brain defects could be responsible for some types of behavior previously chalked up to poor moral character.
"How personally responsible are we for our actions?" said the project's director, Michael S. Gazzaniga, a professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara and director of the SAGE Center for the Study of the Mind.
Similar questions have been weighing on judges.
The U.S. Supreme Court reviewed a legal brief citing brain research as part of its deliberation in Roper v. Simmons, the case in which the court banned the death penalty for children under age 18.
Brain scans were introduced as evidence last year in the trial of John Couey, a Floridian who kidnapped and murdered a 9-year-old girl. The defense said a frontal-lobe asymmetry hindered Couey's control of sexual urges.
Defense lawyers wanted to introduce brain scans last year at the trial of Lisa Montgomery, who strangled a pregnant stranger in Missouri, then stole the dying woman's baby by carving it from her womb with a knife. The baby survived.
Neither approach worked. Couey was sentenced to death. A federal judge refused to allow brain scan testimony at Montgomery's trial. Montgomery also was convicted and sentenced to death.
Richard Henderson Jr., a Florida man who beat four relatives to death, fared slightly better. A jury convicted him, but rejected a call for the death penalty after seeing brain scans the defense said indicated a possible brain disorder.
University of Pennsylvania Law School professor Stephen Morse, a member of the MacArthur Foundation research group, said cases involving neuroscience are still relatively rare _ and for good reason.
Things like foolproof lie detectors based on brain scans are still "more popular imagination than reality," he said, although some companies have begun marketing such devices.
And there is some danger, he said, that jurors could be blinded by science that can't reliably answer legal questions of personal responsibility.
"When people see pictures of the brain, they tend to fall prey to what I call 'the lure of mechanism.' They tend to think that we are all machines," he said.
