Neuroimaging and Responsibility Assessments

Abstract

Could neuroimaging evidence help us to assess the degree of a person’s responsibility for a crime which we know that they committed? This essay defends an affirmative answer to this question. A range of standard objections to this high-tech approach to assessing people’s responsibility is considered and then set aside, but I also bring to light and then reject a novel objection—an objection which is only encountered when functional (rather than structural) neuroimaging is used to assess people’s responsibility.

Neuroimage Evidence and the Insanity Defense

“…Despite the non-influence of neuroimagery, however, jurors who were not provided with a neuroimage indicated that they believed neuroimagery would have been the most helpful kind of evidence in their evaluations of the defendant. Fueled by advances in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), functional MRI (fMRI), and other imaging technology, neuroscience evidence -particularly neuroimage-based evidence -has started to find its way into trials of criminal cases, offered to help resolve a range of issues, among them competence, capacity to form a mental state necessary to be guilty of a crime, criminal responsibility (insanity), as mitigation evidence in capital murder penalty phase hearings (Appelbaum, 2009;Baskin, Edersheim, & Price, 2007;Erickson, 2010;Fabian, 2010;Fiegenson, 2006;Greely, 2008;Hughes, 2010;Jones Buckholtz, Schall, & Marois, 2009;Mobbs, Lau, Jones, & Frith, 2007;Moriarty, 2008;Sinnott-Armstrong, Roskies, Brown, & Murphy, 2008;Vincent, 2011;Witzel et al, 2008). In anticipating this development in neuropsychiatric expert testimony, numerous commentators -from both the legal and scientific communities -have cautioned about a range of inadequacies in the current state of the art and science, especially if offered in legal settings.…”

The Existing Study and Future Directions on the Connotation and Measurement of Sense of Responsibility

“…Vincent uses neuroimaging to study the neural basis of moral responsibility and then to determine a person's common core mental capacity of being responsible or moral. Then researchers use this knowledge to assess a particular individual's sense of responsibility [30] [31].…”

How Empathy Became a Brain Function

“…However, psychopathy tends to be an aggravating rather than a mitigating factor in practice, at least in some jurisdictions, primarily because of its association with relapse and dangerousness (Berg et al 2013;Snead 2007). Such evidence can be a sword that cuts both ways: It is not difficult to imagine a prosecutor arguing that a transgressor must be held more responsible for her or his misdeeds because neuro-imaging has shown the presence of a capacity for empathy in psychopaths, which is engaged deliberately or not in a certain decision, depending on the perpetrator's choice (Vincent 2011(Vincent , 2013. In my view, there are too many open questions in the scheme I coined the Experimental Neurophilosophy Cycle (Figure 2) to presently justify such inferences in practical contexts.…”