Neuroscience in court Flashcards
1
Q
What can neuroscience help us with?
A
- Detecting bias amongst jurors
- Determining whether there was pain or suffering
- Evaluating capacity and opportunity
- Juvenile justice system
- Provide an objective basis for determining recidivism risk
2
Q
Why could neuroscience actually not be that helpful?
A
- Lingua franca problem
- G2i problem
- Clear-cut problem
- May carry too much weight in legal decision-making
- Actions speak louder than images
- Fundamental psycho-legal error
- Need for a control group
- Too complex for jurors Draw inferences from over-reductionism
- Cannot help in grey areas
- Brains differ
- Brains change
3
Q
How do we know when to admit neuroscientific evidence in court?
A
- Frye test:
- General acceptance test
- Admissible if based on principles or techniques which are generally accepted as reliable by the relevant scientific community - Daubert standard:
- Admissible if judge is satisfied that it is helpful, appropriately scientific and correctly applied to the case at hand
- Can the theory be tested and has it been tested?
- Has it been subjected to peer review and publication?
- Is the known or potential error rate of method used high?
- Has the method been standardized?
- Frye test - Can still be excluded if there is a risk of unfair prejudice, confusing the issues or misleading the jury
4
Q
Adolescent criminal culpability
A
- Adolescents are:
- Impulsive
- Reckless
- More susceptible to peer pressure
- Personality traits are not fixed yet
- Risk-taking
- Sensation-seeking - Why?
- Immaturity in connections within a fronto-parietal-striatal brain system involved in self-regulation
- Greater activity in ventral striatum and ventromedial prefrontal cortex involved in processing of emotional and social information as well as prediction of reward and punishment The brain is overwhelmed and struggles to process information - Neuroscience is only useful to confirm behavioural observations
