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?"

Comments

5th

[DoofusOfDeath]

Does a person have a right to privacy over their own memories

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.

Re:5th

[Nuclear Elephant]

Just to play devil's advocate, the courts could argue here in the US that brain scans are evidentiary, and not testimony (hence witness against one's self). My guess is they would argue that brain scans are of the same family of evidence as DNA; e.g. it doesn't "testify against you", but is rather physically relevant to the case. I would hope that this would cause outrage, but judging by the number of other things the government has desensitized us to, it wouldn't surprise me.

Re:5th

[elrous0]

If psychics are so real, how come none have come forward to debunk James Randi (the way that he has debunked dozens of them)? It would seem a fairly simple task. He has even agreed to meet psychics on "neutral ground," but still no takers.

Did anyone else ...

[DikSeaCup]

Did anyone else read that headline and think, "She scanned his brain and it killed him?"

Re:Did anyone else ...

[oodaloop]

Seconded. I think perhaps the title could have been better worded. Like, "Brain Scan Used in Murder Conviction of Indian Woman".

The developed world has similar attitudes

[Brian Ribbon]

" 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.

Re:The developed world has similar attitudes

[Thaelon]

Your post, and even the link you provided are missing something extremely important. A definition of "children". If you definition of children includes sexually mature humans in their late teens, but still children by some legal definition then it's really a rather misleading statistic, don't you think? There's a reason they're called jailbait. They're physically mature enough to be sexually attractive to other members of the species for no other reason than the basic human desire to procreate that we all share, but legally, and perhaps morally off limits.

It Will Never Work

[DynaSoar]

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.