Posts tagged NEUROlaw

Guilty, but not responsible?

Any scientific developments that threatened our notion of free will would seem to put the ethics of punishing people for their bad behaviour in question. In Free Will Harris debates these ideas and asks whether or not, given what brain science is telling us, criminal justice, in focusing on retribution, rests on an entirely false basis. An example he gives is a murderer who kills because of a brain tumour. This person is a victim, not a criminal. The tumour is the cause of his crimes. People imagine that the normal brain is a different story. But in fact the study of any criminal brain, says Harris, is the equivalent of finding a tumour in it – the wrong genes being transcribed, the brain being dictated by events over which he has no control. Human choice, says Harris,

“…is as important as fanciers of free will believe. But the next choice you make will come out of the darkness of prior causes that you, the conscious witness of your experience, did not bring into being.”

Clearly we need to lock up dangerous people. But there is no sense to the idea that they somehow deserve it. Retributive justice is like requiring us to hate, as well as shoot, a wild animal who escapes from the zoo.” 

When we say lock up, are we still talking about punishment?  Inside the forensic hospitals I have visited, there is a brick-solid tension between staff and inmates/patients as to how to treat them. A common dilemma the staff struggles with is should they been treat the prisoners as medical patients and deliver care since they are generally not guilty by reason of insanity (NGRI) or should they be treated like as captured monsters, since dangerous behavior IS what landed them there? Staff safety is a major concern obviously.  Taking a tip from Norway, a novel change would be a path toward first treating them like humans- since no matter what they did/how heinous it was - that’s all they are.

“Increased Frontotemporal Activation During Pain Observation in Sexual Sadism”

Sexual sadism is a psychiatric disorder in which sexual pleasure is derived from inflicting pain, suffering, or humiliation on others. While the psychological and forensic aspects of sexual sadism have been well characterized, little is known about the neurocognitive circuitry associated with the disorder. Sexual sadists show increased peripheral sexual arousal when observing other individuals in pain. The neural mechanisms underlying this unusual response are not well understood. We predicted that sadists relative to nonsadists would show increased responses in brain regions associated with sexual arousal (amygdala, hypothalamus, and ventral striatum) and affective pain processing (anterior cingulate and anterior insula) during pain observation. 

Sadists relative to nonsadists showed greater amygdala activation when viewing pain pictures. They also rated pain pictures higher on pain severity than nonsadists. Sadists but not nonsadists showed a positive correlation between pain severity ratings and activity in the anterior insula. [via]

The deal here is, sadists’ scans showed “unusually heightened” sensitivity to pain in others which ahhhh perfectly ties into my research hypothesis about the censored blankity blank levels in sadists compared to somethin’ somethin’ in the whosey whats. I’m still trying to push this proposal from being “accepted” to the green light stage where I can begin work.  I’m ready to be untied now, Sirs. 

Harenski, C., Thornton, D., Harenski, K., Decety, J., & Kiehl, K. (2012). Increased Frontotemporal Activation During Pain Observation in Sexual Sadism: Preliminary Findings Archives of General Psychiatry, 69 (3), 283-292 [img]

Check it out: The first neurobiological model for third-party punishment

Here’s a a very recent update to my last post on the Neurobiology of Punishment by Joshua W Buckholtz and René Marois, breaking down the events that take place in the brain when asked to make decisions regarding punishment. Of the five processes you have the frontal cortex (higher mental functions) the amygdala (emotional responses) and the intraparietal sulcus and temporal-parietal junction (interpreting the intent of others, thoery of mind).

In the modern criminal justice system, judges and jury members – impartial third-party decision-makers – are tasked to evaluate the severity of a criminal act, the mental state of the accused and the amount of harm done, and then integrate these evaluations with the applicable legal codes and select the most appropriate punishment from available options. (…) 

 [via] 

  One of the key take aways is that:

..it’s assumed legal decision-making is purely based on rational thinking, research suggests that much of the motivation for punishing is driven by negative emotional responses to the harm. This signal appears to be generated in the amygdala, causing people to factor in their emotional state when making decisions instead of making solely factual judgments.

Getting ahead of ourselves: glossy brain porn v. emotion  

What happens if the jury is presented with neuroscientific evidence suggesting what may have caused the accused to offend, e.g., a brain scan showing a tumor? This may challenge the negative emotional response since it’s been reported that this type of evidence is so seductive to juries. >law & order, donk donk<

Article here.

[Img: Parts of the brain involved in third party punishment. (Rene Marois, Deborah Brewington/Vanderbilt University)]

I was revisiting a Nature article published about using fMRI as evidence in a murder case featuring someone’s work that I don’t talk enough about, Dr. Kent Kiehl. I find his research focusing on criminal psychopathy using fMRI extremely interesting.

The purpose of the work, Kiehl says, is to eliminate the stigma against psychopaths and find them treatments so they can stop committing crimes. But [the] lawyers saw  another purpose. During sentencing for capital crimes, the defence may present just about anything as a mitigating factor, from accounts  of the defendant being abused as a child to  evidence of extreme emotional disturbance. Kiehl’s research could offer a persuasive argument that Dugan is a psychopath and could not control his killer impulses.

Eight years I’ve spent in my business working with psychologists and psychopharmacologists prepping them as expert witnesses, so I was glad to see an article that not only discusses some of the debate on if the science of fMRI is ready for the courts, but also offers a little peep on how the attorneys intend to use this new tool.

Like I’ve said before, the bottom line (after sorting the science/admissibility) is educating the jury on brain scans, which is no easy task since to understand what the image is mapping, one needs an understanding of physics, math, neurobiology and very complex data analysis techniques. To that end, and in the time being, lawyers will be looking for more neuroscience experts to battle this out infront of the jury, much to some researchers’ dismay.

Would we rather spend time explaining the science and admit we aren’t exactly confident in it and why (which I do not consider a “soap box” position) or repeat that it’s not ready, click our heels 3 times and hope attorneys don’t take advantage? Those that don’t support the former, by default, may be allowing the latter. Besides, even if science get to say how far fMRI should reach, lawyers will be the ones saying how fast it will get there.  It would still seem the immediate need is two fold: more replication studies, more subjects and investigating further the potential of fMRI in clinical applications. 

Nature’s full article here. 

Notes on Neurobiological Substrates of Punishment

•  Impulsive punishment may relate to amygdala-based circuitry (AM/PAG, yellow), where there is associative learning between cues and outcomes.

• Instrumental punishment may be connected to striatal-mediated reinforcement for goal oriented actions. This type of punishment may lead to appetitive retributive goals (fascinating), possibly coming from the MFOC (medial orbitofrontal cortex), or from forward-planning areas of the prefrontal cortex which also plays a role in theory of mind (blue areas).

• These appetitive/instinctual actions may reinforce further action through the dorsomedial striatum (DMS,green) which if becoming “habit-based”, we’re then looking at reinforced action through dorsolateral striatum (DLS, red), which would likely indicate dopamine-dependent circuits. 

[via: The Neurobiology of Punishment]

“Unintentional Punishment”

Criminal law theorists overwhelmingly agree that for some conduct to constitute punishment, it must be imposed intentionally. Some retributivists have argued that because punishment consists only of intentional inflictions, theories of punishment can ignore the merely foreseen hardships of prison, such as the mental and emotional distress inmates experience. Though such distress is foreseen, it is not intended, and so it is technically not punishment. In this essay, I explain why theories of punishment must pay close attention to the unintentional burdens of punishment. In two very important contexts — punishment measurement and justification — we use the term “punishment” to capture not only intentional harsh treatment but certain unintentional harsh treatment as well. This means that the widely accepted view that punishment is an intentional infliction requires substantial caveats. It also means that any purported justification of punishment that addresses only the intentional infliction of punishment is woefully incomplete. [2]

Always appreciative of Adam Kolber’s work, I wonder how long it will take before such treatment/torture is minimized with this in mind, or if big picture economic reasoning will be the catalyst that initiates baby steps to that end. After all, we are a nation of altruistic punishers, happy to pay out of our own pockets to punish wrongdoers. Like addicts watching others base it up cueing a dopamine rush in the dorsal striatum, we crave to see offenders get their comeuppance. So if it feels so good to punish, how much do we care that we are doing it wrong?

“Can we have free will, if the brain’s actions are automatic? A scholar makes the case” 

Warned at the outset that the topic ignited controversy, the evening’s Q&A featured an outraged tirade by a speaker so apoplectic over Gazzaniga’s claims of the deterministic brain, that he could barely make himself understood. This was balanced by the question of a more modest audience member worried only about his ‘senior moments.’ He had attended a talk given by Eric Kandel, Nobel-prize winning neuroscientist, and had also asked Kandel’s counsel, hoping there would be a simple solution such as eating “brain food.” “What do you advise?” he asked Gazzaniga. “Blueberries and martinis,” Gazzaniga answered. “What did Kandel say?” asked Gazzaniga. The man replied, “wine every night and forget about it!”

Agita, quaque die post meridiem. Ex modo prescripto.

“The Anatomy of Evil”

In folk neuroscience there is a conception that at some point, brain malfunction overrides free will and cases like the Kansas man’s or psychopathy appear.  But this is not quite true; brain function underlies everything we do: the good, the bad, and the utterly mundane (or else what is operating your muscles to move, or allowing you to proceed from one thought to the next?).  It’s a fact that lies implicit in every theory of human behaviour and the human condition – law, psychology, philosophy, economics.  As many neuroscientists and philosophers argue, this doesn’t undermine the idea of free will; it’s just an interpretation of how free will works in terms of neural connections.

It is undisputed that new research in the brain sciences is having an increasing effect in the law courts, and there are worries over whether juries are capable of understanding the significance of such medical evidence that might be presented to them, not least because of the tendency to think that if something’s in the brain, it’s not a person’s fault.  An understanding of how brain abnormalities produce impulsive or immoral behaviour is changing how we think of “evil” – but whether this knowledge can relieve perpetrators of responsibility, or even eradicate  the old-fashioned conceptions of evil and morality remains to be seen. [via]

It’s a simple but deeply unsettling question.

One that scientists are now starting to answer. …meet the scientist who believes he has found the moral molecule and the man who is using this new understanding to rewrite our ideas of crime and punishment.

The BBC’s (sensationalized) 4 part series here.