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Indian Woman Convicted of Murder By Brain Scan
Kaseijin writes "Neuroscientist Champadi Raman Mukundan claims his Brain Electrical Oscillations Signature test is so accurate, it can tell whether a person committed or only witnessed an act. In June, an Indian judge agreed, using BEOS to find a woman guilty of killing her former fiancé. Scientific experts are calling the decision 'ridiculous' and 'unconscionable,' protesting that Mukundan's work has not even been peer reviewed. How reliable should a test have to be, when eyewitnesses are notoriously fallible? Does a person have a right to privacy over their own memories, or should society's interest in holding criminals accountable come first?"
In the U.S. I would say yes, because we have the 5th Amendment to the Constitution. In Indian law, I have no idea.
At first blush this sounds like a high-tech form of seeing if the witch can float.
Did anyone else read that headline and think, "She scanned his brain and it killed him?"
I talk about stuff.
So, a male centric and predominantly misogynistic country used this new and entirely untested technique to find a woman guilty of murder.
Gosh, what a surprise.
We are talking about a country where women regularly get murdered by the men in their own family, and no-one is punished, after all.
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
Would a man have been convicted in this case? Or is this just another example of the crap that women still face in most societies around the world?
This machine has not been peer reviewed, and yet a judge trusts it? Sounds like the judge should be removed from their position. And all convictions related to this judge that might be plausibly shown to have been influenced by this judge's ignorance, should be thrown out.
I hope this women is able to appeal.
As to privacy related to memories. Well, I would suggest that this machine isn't capable of reading a person's memories at all. However, I do think that this should be voluntary only. After all, there are many memories not related to the alleged crime that would have to be "read". Not only that (at least in the USA), all information "found" not related to the "crime" should not be able to be used by law enforcement.
I'm sure you could make a Fifth Amendment type argument here (if you are in the USA).
I wank in the shower.
If this would take a bad road then in another 10 years we'll be remote-scanned when we walk around outside (or even at home) and convicted when we have only intentions of committing a crime (which is already true in some countries just sans the remote-brain-scan part). Sounds like Precrime to me.
Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many.
I honestly think that if someone commits a crime like murder they should be held accountable, period. BUT, there's no way this brain scan thing works. I mean, REALLY. Ask the question again when the thing isn't a bunch of BS.
Also...
:P
...the headline made me think she fried someone's brain with an MRI or something. Might want to see to that.
Friend: "The NIC is misconfigured..." Me: "No prob, I'll just telnet in and fix it." *Silence*
Ok, so is this guy Edward Nigma, or one of Frank Herbert's characters from Ix? I expect to see this kind of story at the grocery store, next to the reports of aliens eating someone's dog, and sightings of BatBoy.
Why, without your clothes, you're naked, Miss Dudley!
Ouch. You know it's from an old(ish) movie when they get the population of the earth too low by over two billion people.
"Scientifically rigous" reliable if that test is to be taken over eyewitness testimony. And, that is what actually happens. If a witness looks at a defendant says "That guy did it." and a fingerprint examiner says "No, he didn't" and a DNA expert says "No, he didn't", the defendant is not going to trial. Evidence and test results are hard facts and is acknowledged as being more reliable than witness testimony. The tests must be scientifically rigorous or they are only as good as the memory of eyewitnesses.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
This device is guaranteed to only give what you judge to be true positives... if you only use it on people you've already decided are guilty.
" Man sexually attracted to children, court told "
"A Canberra court has heard an O'Connor man who has been charged with downloading child pornography from the internet finds young children sexually attractive."
So he must have done it! Police never try to set up unpopular members of society.
Presumably he'll get a longer sentence as a result of admitting that he's attracted to children.
"To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free" ~ Nineteen Eighty-Four
What's mental is that a jury (or worse, a judge) accepted the result of a new, questionable, unproven technology as proof beyond a reasonable doubt that the suspect was guilty. (I assume here that the Indian justice system has the same burden of proof as most others.)
What's mental is that this will probably set precedent.
What's mental is that this may be used from now on without question even when we did the same thing with polygraphs, only to realize later that they are notoriously inaccurate.
What. The. Fuck.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
Eyewitness testimony is fallible for the same reason one's own memory for personal events is fallible: everything we 'remember' is constructed from what is stored and seems related, producing the fastest good enough result. The same research supports both. False memory and memory rejection can happen because memory is never entirely accurate. One can even be fooled into "remembering" something someone else supposedly saw but never occurred, convolving both eyewitness report and personal memory. The foremost researchers in this field are often called to testify in court cases where false and lost memory are involved.
As such, if this judge had any sense, he'd throw the supposed researcher in jail and recuse himself after throwing out the verdict. There's no way a "brain scan" can tell how accurate a "memory" is unless it can compare what it's measuring with the perception and cognition during the actual event. And if it could do that, the operator would be there to witness the same event.
The researcher should at very least be investigated for scientific fraud. The same people that would have thrown his work(?) out under peer review would testify against him.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
If someone calls you a witch there, you get lynched... I'd say a brain-scan is at least a step in the right direction.
India's legal system might not have the same standards that the US system has. You can't really base judgment on India's system using the US standards as a measure, especially considering the number of innocent people who are sent to jail in the US.
A difference that is increasingly lost on juries (remember the O.J. trial).
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
Indeed. It's unfortunate that Simpson almost certainly got away with murder. But the fact of the matter is that the LAPD was a bunch of incompetent bumbling fools in the matter, and hateful fools at that. Their attempts to frame a (probably) guilty man ended up setting him free. The jury's decision was correct in this case.
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
No it's not... It's sarcasm.
But this IS the same in the general sense that pseudo-science is being used to perform predictions about personality traits. Sure, EVENTUALLY, we may be able to determine if a person is lying through a brain scan. But not now and certainly not because eletrical activity in brain quadrant 27-a is more active than in 14-b. That's about the same as saying that because you have a bump in the upper right forehead you're more prone to lying...
(although I was going more for "funny" mods than "informative"...)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrenology#Methodology
Memories are notoriously inaccurate. It is a known fact that even memories of events with a big impact, the kind of events that are memorised best, usually bear only a passing resemblance to the actual event. Most of what a memory is is actually reconstructed, that is to say, you kind of start with a few kernels of truth and then fill in the gaps. And memories get distorted over time. They can easily change, be implanted, or fuse with memories with one or more shared givens. This is why eyewitness testimony is not usually allowed in court anymore where I live; a former rector of my university did a great deal to investigate reliability of eyewitnesses and to raise our consciousness to what he was shocked to find.
Then there is the technology of brain scanning, which is only in its infancy. So it isn't even feasable to scan what a person thinks he remembers, let alone judge whether that's accurate. Brain scans can only measure things like energy consumption, signal strength and bloodflow at the moment. Decoding actual memories and thoughts is still beyond our technological capabilities. You can maybe (maybe!) detect if someone recognises a photograph with some kind of accuracy, but you certainly can't determine if someone killed someone, let alone who. The fact that the technology hasn't been peer reviewed yet should raise a big red flag, people.
And then there is the ethical angle. Where I live this would be called forced testimony, which is illegal. To put it in a form that most of you will recognise: it would take away people's right to remain silent. Essentially, testimony extracted with a brain scan is similar to testimony extracted with torture and should be (and is, where I live) just as illegal.