One Day University

The future is arriving at our courthouses with lawyers deploying the latest in brain scans to make their cases. Yet this technology presents a whole new set of problems concerning justice and guilt. Consider a defendant facing a murder charge that is strongly supported by eye witnesses and physical evidence, but a brain scan of the defendant seems to reveal a frontal lobe abnormality of a kind that is correlated with violent behavior. Could this neural condition show that the defendant is not fully responsible? Should the defendant be allowed to call neuroscientists as expert witnesses or to introduce brain scans as evidence during the trial? Or consider a criminal defendant who asks to introduce brain scans as evidence that he is not lying when he denies his guilt. Should the judge admit these brain scans into the trial? Should accusing witnesses be required to submit to the same kind of neural lie detection? Should jurors and judges be subjected to neural methods of detecting racial bias when a case is racially charged? Professor Sinnott-Armstrong explains the technology and explores a variety of legal issues that arise when neuroscience enters the court room.