Brain Scans Used In Murder Sentencing

sciencehabit writes "For what may be the first time, fMRI scans of brain activity have been used as evidence in the sentencing phase of a murder trial. Defense lawyers for an Illinois man convicted of raping and killing a 10-year-old girl used the scans to argue that their client should be spared the death penalty because he has a brain disorder. Some experts say the scans are irrelevant because they were taken 20+ years after the crimes were committed. Others point out that the scans are only being considered because the sentencing phase of a trial has less stringent standards about evidence than those used to establish a defendant's innocence or guilt." In the Illinois case, the fMRI defense didn't help the defendant, whom a jury sentenced to death.

Comments

Great defence!

[Quasar1999]

If anything, it would help the jury decide to sentence him to death... obviously they're helping him by not letting him live, thus his horribly diseased brain won't make him suffer any longer... Really it's the humanitarian thing to do... :P

Re:Great defence!

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

There are some specific cases where brain abnormality evidence seems like it would be very valuable to the defendant. This guy for instance. Initially pretty normal. Gradually develops increasingly problematic sexual misbehavior. Just before being sent to jail, goes to the ER with a headache and neurological symptoms. They MRI him and chop out a huge tumor pressing on his frontal lobe. Sexual misbehavior stops.

Some time later, it starts up again. They check, and the tumor has partially regrown. Tumor is again resected, and patient is again fine.

In a case like that, there seems to be a compelling argument to be made that the defendant's behavior is a medical problem rather than a criminal one(and a treatable medical problem, not an "well, enjoy the secure ward for the rest of your life" medical problem). If, though, your plea is basically "But, but, this MRI shows exactly the part of my brain that makes me a violent shitbag..." That seems fairly useless to you(though it might be helpful in the long term, if it helps us figure out how to stop producing people like you). Obviously, with sufficient scientific knowledge, it will be possible to identify the anatomic basis of your behavior. So what?

Re:Great defence!

[jamesh]

From a purely scientific point of view it does make some sense. The trouble is that you would be putting people in charge of who gets to breed and who doesn't, and we've already demonstrated that people are not capable of running a bank properly so imagine what's going to happen if you put them in charge of something like this... Once someone in power decides that pointing out flaws in the government is not a good trait to have, it all goes downhill really fast - there doesn't need to be a 'real' gene for it either, once the system is corrupt people can make up whatever they want.

Also, have a look at some of the defects in some of the greatest people of our time. Einstein had a majorly lopsided brain etc. Obviously not necessarily genetic though.

Re:Great defence!

[hairyfeet]

You know, I always thought is was how a person was raised, and not their DNA, that made them who they were, that is, until it happened in my own family.

My two cousins, lets call them Rick and Don, were raised exactly the same way, in fact until Rick turned 16 and everything came out we all thought they were biological brothers. It turned out my Aunt and Uncle had been told when they lived in Texas they couldn't have kids, and therefor adopted Rick at less than a week old, naturally boom a year later Don is born. They were very "all children are gifts from God" and spending many a night in their home and living down the street from them I can attest they never treated either kid differently from the other. But before Rick was even 12 there were problems-torturing animals, stealing, vicious behavior, bullying, etc. Finally they managed to get the court records unsealed and ....damn.

It turned out Rick's mom was a whore who was doing 10-20 for cutting up a John over a fee with a razor, and his dad was her pimp who I swear was a fricking axe murderer! No shit, they guy got into an argument over cash, went to his truck, got an axe and chopped the guy into little pieces and got life without parole. Now Rick is locked up in the same prison where his biological dad died, charged as a habitual offender he most likely will never get out again. My aunt and uncle spent huge sums of money trying to help him, therapy, drugs, etc all to no avail. Don is about as boring as you can get, I don't think he or his wife have ever gotten so much as a traffic ticket.

So I really have to wonder if there is something in the DNA. My aunt looked up his biological family and both sides were nothing but violence-rapes,beatings, killings, etc as far back as she could find.And as I said both boys were raised side by side, same house, food, treatment, etc, in a house filled with love and caring parents. So maybe there is something to the "bad gene" idea, who knows. Maybe we can isolate the genes and hopefully get rid of them. But watching it unfold in my own family killed the whole "it is just the environment they are raised in" BS for me. Because they got Rick straight from the hospital and he had never been exposed to his family, nor would he or any of us even known they existed if things hadn't gone so wrong.

Re:Great defence!

[fractoid]

Is it, though? Now we're getting into the philosophy of punishment. There are three basic motivations that I can see for punishing someone for a crime (as distinct from forcing them to make reparations):

• To reduce the likelihood of re-offending (especially applies to incarceration).
• To serve as an example, to deter others from perpetrating the same offense
• Revenge

Imagine a kiddy fiddler of the worst order. He's molested scores of children, caused untold harm to them, etc. Now imagine that, on the day that he's caught, they can for whatever reason clinically prove that he's 'cured' and would be constitutionally unable to re-offend. Should he go free? I imagine the response would be a universal and emphatic "no, of course not!" The only motive for incarcerating or executing him at this point would be revenge.

Re:Great defence!

[hairyfeet]

I think I may be able to help you "see" how it might not be as cut and dried as you make it, from an example of one of Rick's earlier "mishaps". One day I got to listen to him and his parents fight (he was about 12 IIRC) over an incident earlier that day. Apparently he had walked around a corner and bumped a neighbor's cat, which had become startled and scratched him. He (very calmly from what I remember) reached down, picked up the neighbor's cat, and bashed its head against a tree in a single blow powerful enough to splatter its brains all over the tree.

Now the "funny" part, which I always remember about the incident, is nobody was ever able to explain why he shouldn't do that in a way he could understand. To him it was very logical, cat scratched him, kill the cat, cat won't scratch him no more. He simply couldn't understand why everyone made a big deal about that, or why he should care that the neighbor loved the cat, or anything of the sort. His mind simply didn't work that way. No empathy, no feelings for others, no concept of how his actions would affect others or have repercussions, no concept at all of these things. It was like trying to explain to an alien what it was like to live as a human being-he could understand the words, but they simply didn't have any meaning to him. You might as well have been speaking German for all he understood.

And THAT is what makes him different from you, me, and a good portion of the planet. You talk about having "self control" but if you simply don't understand WHY you should have self control then really, how good would your self control be? Some call it a soul, some a conscience, whatever it is that makes a person see that other living beings have value and that feelings other than you own at THAT moment have meaning and are just as real, whatever that part was, he just didn't have it. So I don't see how you could say it is a cop out, although I could see how some might try to abuse it, but it really wouldn't be hard to look at a history of someone like Rick and see a pattern. For him the only real person is him. Only his emotions are valid, the concept of caring about how others feel is simply an alien thought process to him.

And finally to show this wasn't some "act" that he used only when it was in his favor, he once flipped a bug convertible and broke his neck. Rather than wait for help he crawled out of the wreck held his head up by pulling his hair with his hand and walked to the dope dealer's house, who had the good sense to call an ambulance. Why did he do that? Because he wanted some dope. It never occurred to him that he could be paralyzed, or that by doing so he was causing damage that ended up with him being in a halo for twice as long as it otherwise would have been, to him crawling out and walking to where the dope was with a broken neck was just as logical as could be. That was just how he brain worked.

Re:Capital Punishment

[Anonymous Coward]

Capital punishment can encourage heinous crimes. If a suspect has already committed a crime that warrants capital punishment, then that suspect will have nothing to lose by committing more crimes.

Re:Nature versus Nurture

[CannonballHead]

Let's assume, for a moment, that we have a murderer or rapist that does it because he's genetically wired to do it.

What then? Put him in a "special" place and do genetic "testing" on him? That doesn't sound so nice.

Let him go, because "he couldn't help it" and thus he is not culpable? Hm. That, from a protect-society standpoint, sounds incredibly stupid.

Re:OK slashdot.

[Penguinisto]

Err, what if he's thinking about Chewbacca? Might even get him acquitted.

Before we go insane thinking he'll be set free...

[Theaetetus]

... bear in mind that when you get to sentencing for a capital crime, the options are not "death penalty" or "10-20 years with probation and time off for good behavior". Rather, it's "death penalty" or "life without parole".

You may now return to your previously-scheduled flame war.

Re:Capital Punishment

[LordNimon]

If a suspect has already committed a crime that warrants life in prison without parole, then that suspect will have something to lose by committing more crimes.

Re:Capital Punishment

[digitalunity]

I could see that. Bank robbery goes wrong, accidentally kills someone, robber keeps killing because they've already crossed a line they didn't want to cross...

Even if you're wrong, it certainly seems that capital punishment does little to reduce crimes we currently deem worthy of capital punishment.

Re:Capital Punishment

[Anonymous Coward]

OK, so outlaw capital punishment. Then we have a new problem.

Life imprisonment can encourage heinous crimes. If a suspect has already committed a crime that warrants life imprisonment, then that suspect will have nothing to lose by committing more crimes.

See where this is going?

I'm not in favor of capital punishment either, but your argument against it is specious.

Personally...

[jd]

I regard the death penalty as somewhat childish and immature. "If X can't be alive, then... then... Neither Can Yoooooo! So nyah!" The idea that it gives closure to anything seemed to get a kick in the nuts with the Beltway Sniper's execution. If you don't get closure when the other person doesn't cry, then I'm not sure it's "closure" you're looking for. Try looking up "schoolyard bully".

I'm also not keen on the way a lot of these trials are handled, especially the insanity stuff. A person being insane doesn't alter whether or not they did something, it merely alters their culpability. That should be obvious.

Ergo, it follows that insanity should not be a plea in the trial phase but confined strictly to that phase which deals with culpability, the sentencing.

However, I also disagree with this idea that there are two options - total all-out criminal insanity and total all-out sanity. For a start, it doesn't leave you with anywhere to put lawyers or politicians.

I would far prefer to see a system in which sanity is regarded as a sliding scale and where sentencing allows the judge to split the time between punishment, treatment and rehabilitation (as and where appropriate) according to what produces the best outcome overall, rather than according to what gives the weenies in the press box a vicarious thrill.

Obviously, if a person is going to be incarcerated forever, then rehabilitation to the point where the person would be safe outside is not terribly useful. On the other hand, it seems reasonable to assume that having them stew, rebel and resent is both less cost-effective and less mature than encouraging them to make effective use of their abilities.

Just because someone is sealed off from society doesn't mean society can't benefit from their mind - there's probably plenty of intellectuals and artists behind bars.

Ian Brady is probably one of the craziest crazies to be in Broadmoor, but his book on the way serial killers think, feel and act should certainly be at least browsed by psychiatrists and detectives for insights no rational mind could ever have produced. No matter how little value it really is, the chances are really good that it'll do more good than the British Police's DNA database and CCTV camera system.

I'd rather let a hundred cold-blooded killers live in jail and receive at least some respect as a person if it meant that just one of those hundred produced a masterpiece of art or a book that had significance than have all hundred die purely for the viewing pleasure of Weekend Warriors.

In a hundred years time, which makes the difference? Something that might only rarely advance humanity - but when it does, advance it a lot - or something that provides a momentary mental orgasm for a bunch of f'ed-up "witnesses" and some losers outside and that's it?

I don't see why I should pay taxes for someone getting off on watching another die, when I could be paying taxes to give those in prison a chance to do something positive and worthwhile.

Re:Personally...

[dissy]

I regard the death penalty as somewhat childish and immature. "If X can't be alive, then... then... Neither Can Yoooooo! So nyah!" The idea that it gives closure to anything seemed to get a kick in the nuts with the Beltway Sniper's execution. If you don't get closure when the other person doesn't cry, then I'm not sure it's "closure" you're looking for. Try looking up "schoolyard bully".

Well at least you fully understand the American justice system.

It is one thing and one thing only: Revenge

If the powers that be, and those that put them in power, even cared in the slightest about justice, stopping crime, and helping people, then our legal system would be turned on its head and look totally different.

Unfortunately this is what most people in America want however. Not justice, just revenge. Not lack of crime, just to create more crime to dish out more suffering. It satisfies both the animal rage instincts as well as gives a false sense of superior morality.

Re:Capital Punishment

[evanbd]

In the case of the death penalty, if your crimes are heinous enough (treason, murder, kidnapping and rape should all qualify IMHO) then I don't see any problems with society putting you out of our collective misery. My only issue with the death penalty is the fact that no justice system is 100% perfect, although I'm not convinced that spending your entire life behind bars for a crime that you didn't commit is anymore humane than being executed for it.

I tend to agree with you; however, the major reason I oppose the death penalty isn't that it's inhumane; it's that we make mistakes. Given an imperfect justice system (as all are), a life sentence made in error can be partially corrected later if new evidence comes to light. It's rare, but there have been a decent number of life sentences later reversed because of new evidence (in particular DNA evidence).

We owe it to the convicted to acknowledge that, in some cases, we make mistakes.

Re:Capital Punishment

[Locke2005]

Incarceration is not for punishment or revenge; it serves 3 purposes to society:
1) Deterrent
2) Rehabilitation
3) Preventing the criminal from re-offending, at least for the time period they are incarcerated.
Of these, it can only be proven effective at accomplishing the 3rd purpose. People with a high probability of re-offending should be kept locked away indefinitely for the protection of others. Capital punishment is probably cheaper than keeping somebody in jail for the rest of their lives, but risking the execution of even 1 innocent person before they are exonerated is not a risk I'm willing to take. Finally, truly twisted criminals tend to not last very long in prison anyway; they are eventually given the Jeffery Dahlmer treatment where they are left alone with a lifer who hates them while the guards look the other way. Even cold blooded killers have no stomach for someone who rapes and kills little girls, and I probably wouldn't go out of my way to protect them from the rest of the prison population either.

Re:Capital Punishment

[Shakrai]

People will NEVER pay for the long term lockup of violent offenders

Stop spending ~$43,000 per prisoner to house them in Club Fed and revert prison to what it should be: Three square meals and the chance to break big rocks into little rocks. Stop locking up non-violent druggies (you'll note that I was talking about violent crimes in my previous post) and use the free space/money to lock up violent criminals that actually pose a threat to the rest of us.

A shoplifter deserves a shot at rehabilitation. An armed robber does not. Both sought unearned material gain -- but the latter was willing to threaten violence against his fellow human beings in order to obtain it. Once you demonstrate that you are willing to do that then I don't think you deserve to live among the rest of us. You are no better than a rapid dog and deserve to be treated accordingly.

Re:Capital Punishment

[Artifakt]

The deterrent effect just doesn't happen. Looking at actual death penalty convictions, there's so few cases where the prisoner has shown any ability to imagine what their life might be like a mere six months down the road, they just aren't capable of thinking, "Ten years from now, if I do X, I could end up getting a lethal injection like that guy.".
          I don't see any way we could get the total time from arrest to execution down to six months in our legal system, and do anything remotely like justice. That's bad enough. But when so many of these cases can't even project six months ahead, any reasonable system of trial and punishment has zero deterrence.
        We have a case just finishing up in my area. Multiple defendants tried separately, for two murders with lots of additional nastiness like rape and torture. Going by what the two defendants convicted so far have said in the televised trial footage. if a program had come on the TV showing someone convicted of the exact crime they were planning, and how it took less than a week to get from the trial, to the graphically televised three day execution by slow torture, they would have still done it. You could have a 99.9% conviction rate and rotting heads on spikes on every street corner these idiots walked past, and they still wouldn't believe it was going to eventually happen to them.
        I'm not arguing for or against capital punishment, mind you, not taking a stand either way. I'm just saying a hope of deterrence shouldn't be why anyone decides to favor capital punishment, because the people who get it are just plain too stupid to deter.

Re:Capital Punishment

[Runaway1956]

Anyone who claims that our prisons are rehabilitative are totally out of touch with reality. It is at least as accurate to say that petty criminals who find their way to prison get the opportunity to learn new and better ways of committing crime.

If we ever correct the serious disconnect between the idealists' vision of prison, and the reality of prison, then we MIGHT begin to correct the abortion we have today.

The United States has one of the highest per capita incarceration rates in the world. Those cells are built, and kept filled, more to keep revenue flowing throughout government and society, than to "rehabilitate" anyone. The prison system is so lucrative, private corporations are getting into the act.

Please, just drop the rehab crap. IF rehab is really a part of the prison system, it's so relatively unimportant that we can ignore it.

Re:Capital Punishment

[hazem]

I was just reading Freakonomics and they make the case that part of that decline was also because of Row vs. Wade and the greater availability of abortion. They say the evidence supports the idea that Row vs. Wade made abortion available to women in poverty and that their aborted children were among the group that would have been most likely to become violent criminals. They do quite a few comparisons between states that legalized abortion at different times and other factors to show this.

I'm not sure I accept it, but it's an interesting argument.

Re:Capital Punishment

[Spykk]

You are no better than a rapid dog and deserve to be treated accordingly.

Forced to chase a mechanical bunny around a race track?

Re:Capital Punishment

[shutdown -p now]

There's one more point that just came to my mind, though it is, perhaps, somewhat U.S.-centric, and it may be my wrongful interpretation anyway as I'm not an American. If you start with the concept of inalienable rights, the famous "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness", then wouldn't any wrongful execution, being intentional deprivation of a person's life, violate his inalienable right? And therefore, unless you can guarantee with absolute certainty (meaning just that - 100% - not 99.9...%) that executions are never wrongful, death penalty as an institution is inherently in violation of the right to life?

(Yes, I know that the phrase comes from the U.S. Declaration of Independence rather than Constitution, and therefore has no legal force. Nonetheless, if one subscribes to the notion of inalienable rights in the first place, they are inherently above laws.)