In an unprecedented attempt to bridge the gap between the radiology room and the courtroom, Washington University’s Schools of Medicine and Law will be collaborating to decide how brain scans should be used within the legal system.
The University will contribute neuroscientists and legal scholars, in coordination with over two dozen other universities nationwide, to work on the $10 million project.
Researcher Marcus Raichle, a professor in the schools of Medicine, Arts & Sciences, and Engineering, is co-directing one of the three research groups.
“Somebody with a brain lesion or disorder-clearly their behavior has been altered by this. Are they responsible for their actions?” said Raichle, “A teenager who has committed a crime-should they be held responsible? If so or not, how do we decide this?”
The project’s first three years are funded by a $10 million MacArthur Foundation grant with the purpose of “addressing the topics of addiction, brain abnormalities and decision making as they relate to complex issues such as criminal responsibility,” according to a press release by the Foundation.
One problem Raichle discussed was the admissibility of obscene or offensive evidence in court cases.
Judges are often called to evaluate whether evidence is too disagreeable for jurors to be able to deliberate rationally, possibly influencing the outcome of a case. Experts in neuroscience and psychology may be able to shed light on some of these centuries-old judicial practices, with the hope of shaping the legal system for the better.
Those in favor of the project hope that it will make our insights on important legal concepts such as guilt, punishment, treatment, the detection of lies and bias, and prediction of criminal behavior more accurate, keeping fewer innocent people in jail, and convicting more of the guilty people.
“We’re looking for information and taking a forward look at these issues,” said Raichle. “The question is ‘how do we think about these problems?'”
Skeptics, however, fear that incorporating brain-imaging technology into the legal system may violate rights to privacy and undermine personal responsibility, possibly undermining some of the basic assumptions of law.
Some specific goals of the project will be to hold conferences, publish judicial guidelines for handling neuroscientific evidence, develop scientific research proposals relevant to legal proceedings and possibly publish textbooks for Law and Neuroscience courses at universities.
There will be three working groups to study addiction, brain abnormalities and decision making, the last of which being co-directed by Raichle and Owen Jones, professors of law and of biological sciences at Vanderbilt University.
The MacArthur Foundation is one of the largest private grant-making foundations and awards $225 million annually in grants and low-interest loans. For more information about the project, visit http://lawandneuroscienceproject.org.