Ethan Crumbley, a fifteen-year-old boy responsible for the Oxford high school shooting in Michigan, received a life-sentence after Dr. Lisa Anacker testified that he was not mentally ill. The judge had to consider his maturity, mental health, and family life when deciding on what consequence best fit the crime committed. While many argued that because of his young age his brain was not fully developed, Dr. Anacker (psychiatrist) testified that by what she saw he was fully aware of his actions and not mentally ill, through this we see the vital role that the brain and mental health may have in relation to law.
While many may assume that neuroscience and law do not correlate with each other, the research article on “Law and Neuroscience” by O. Jones et al., shows the connections between the two and how important the field of neurolaw can become in the future. The effectiveness of the legal systems is based on weighing out evidence and why a person behaved in a certain manner. Neuroscience can sometimes illuminate this, as it allows for use of scientific evidence on how the clients brain was behaving and the mental state that they were in. A brain mechanism, TPP, was created to assess these aspects. It was a neural network in which the temporoparietal cortex decodes the actions of the criminal’s mental state. It was seen that the Corticolimbic circuit was in charge of the emotional arousal provoked by a crime. Being able to see which area was active and if it was functioning normally can really aid in the determination of whether or not a person is mentally ill. This can also reveal a lot about addiction, adolescent development, memory, behavior, and motivation. The idea behind using this scientific evidence is to be able to land upon the best punishment for the person. In many cases it has been seen for someone to be given a less severe sentence when it is due to mental illness, similarly to the considerations seen in Crumbley’s case.
However, through using neuroscience in law we see the emergence of “neuro-jurisprudence” as mentioned in the research article “In defense of free will: Neuroscience and criminal responsibility” by Paul Nestor. By declaring that a crime was committed due to mental illness a lot of controversy is raised such as philosophical and practical questions. Jurisprudence is the theory of philosophical law and can raise many questions within different fields, to a neuroscientist the brain is part of free will and to a psychologist it is the person themselves, so who is to blame in this case? According to the law, “a person is not responsible for criminal conduct if at the time of such conduct as a result of mental disease or defect he lacks substantial capacity to appreciate criminality of his conduct or to conform his conduct to the requirement of law.” These standards are determined by two prongs, cognitive and volitional, that must be impaired in order to be deemed as a mental disease or defect. Because of this, it is unlikely for brain imaging to meet criteria of criminal insanity.
Although one article may delve into the drawbacks of the involvement of neuroscience in law, they both agree on the advancements that including it may have in the future. Part of the mission of including neuroscience in law is to guide the legal system into new research that may improve the fairness and effectiveness of the criminal justice system. It can be predicted that in the future a claim of criminal insanity will be based on neurophysiological methods that can be assessed by brain imaging. However, the moral question of criminal responsibility still remains.
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