Neurolaw is a field of study that explores the usage and implications of neuroscience in the legal system. These scientific findings and techniques range from impacting the matters of criminal responsibility, to asking questions about decision-making, ethics, and privacy in the confines of the law. The field of neurolaw has highly evolved in recent years, raising important questions about the integration of scientific advancements into legal frameworks. It has, also, been a heavily debated field, to this day.
A good research article covering all the basic information having to do with neurolaw is “Law and Neuroscience”, by Owen D. Jones et. al. This article focuses primarily on highlighting the aspects of how neuroscience may aid law, before delving into the ethics. The first of these is buttressing, the act of increasing juror confidence by utilizing neuroscientific methods on a conclusion that had already been partially confirmed with non-neuroscientific evidence. Conceptually, there is also an intersection of law and the neuroscience involved with adolescent development for children charged with crimes, the deconstruction of mental states when it comes to classification, recognizing intent, and carrying out a proper punishment, and the analysis of evidence given in a court case. For instance, Miller v Alabama found that mandatory life sentences for juveniles with undeveloped impulse control, planning ahead, and risk avoidance portions of their brains was unconstitutional. For individual occurrences like New York v Herbert Weinstein, neuroimaging being used to discover behavior altering cysts or other such factors will be key to not indicting innocent individuals. Neuroscientific approaches also help assist with mitigating racial profiling and contested court decisions. The involvement of neuroscience in law ideally allows for a promising neuroscientific insight into the legal system that would help increase the fairness and effectiveness of the criminal justice system. The article then goes on to confirm that publications have increased in relation to neuroscience and law especially in the 2000’s and 2010’s, more efforts have been put into the discussion of neuroethics, and the usage of more neuroscientific evidence in the court of law as well. However, the article also touches upon the ethical implications that loom above any different aspects in the legal system, such as the discernment of criminal responsibility when it comes to history and genetics, and the concerns of enabling legal decisions for entire groups of people, notably psychopaths.
A good paper that highlights an example listed above is the article “Aberrant resting-state functional connectivity associated with childhood trauma among juvenile offenders” by Corey H. Allen et. al. This study set about utilizing neuroimaging to examine which subtypes of childhood trauma contributed to differential effects of aberrant intra-network amplitude of fluctuations and connectivity, and inner-network connectivity across resting-state limbic and paralimbic functional network connectivity in incarcerated juvenile male offenders. Consistent with previous research findings, childhood trauma was associated with aberrant intra-network amplitude of connections and fluctuations, predominantly in the paralimbic regions, among incarcerated juvenile males. This included trauma regarding the loss of loved ones, observed trauma, and community violence, and to a lesser extent, physical abuse, emotional abuse, and neglect/poverty. 179 juvenile incarcerated males were used for the study, with the average age being 17.61 years.
Both the ethics reflected in the first paper and the study reflected in the second paper display an interesting moral quandary. Neuroscience can easily help assist the legal system by providing rehabilitory methods for individuals who hold certain trauma. Neuroimaging can be helpful, in certain situations. However, other issues arise, especially with how corrupt the justice system is currently. There is a possibility for unequal access to newer neuroscientific advances, such as neuroimaging. People with certain markers associated with certain behaviors have an increased risk of being labeled and stigmatized and subject to preemptive law enforcement due to the prediction of criminal behavior, rather than receiving the help they may require. There also arises the issue of how admissible information received from neuroimaging is in a court of law, and how consensual such a practice may be in the moment. And the biggest ethical concerns lie in the potential issues of the government collecting all of this brain data, which infringes upon individuals’ autonomy and privacy, and the impact on legal responsibility. With these new questions arising about how heavily influenced one is by neural processes, there will be a challenging of the traditional notions of legal responsibility and culpability. With how the field has developed rapidly just recently in the 2000’s and onward, there is only more to discover.
References:
HT;, J. O. R. M. (n.d.). Law and neuroscience. The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24198354/
Allen CH;Shold J;Michael Maurer J;Reynolds BL;Anderson NE;Harenski CL;Harenski KA;Calhoun VD;Kiehl KA; (n.d.). Aberrant resting-state functional connectivity associated with childhood trauma among juvenile offenders. NeuroImage. Clinical. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36764058/
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