History: Phase I Research Networks (2007 - 2011)
This page presents information about the research networks for Phase I of the Law and Neuroscience Project.
Research Networks
Although rates of violent and serious property crime have declined from their historically high levels achieved some decades ago, there is uniform agreement that the rates are too high and that unprecedented numbers of people are in prison and jail. The criminal courts of the nation are often overburdened as they try to do justice and it is crucial to improve the processes of criminal justice decision making.
We believe that criminal behavior and criminal justice decision making are fruitful places to begin exploring the potential contributions of neuroscience to the law.
We believe that criminal behavior and criminal justice decision making are fruitful places to begin exploring the potential contributions of neuroscience to the law. Within criminal law itself, the issues of criminal responsibility and the prediction of future dangerous conduct and of amenability to treatment stand out as important topics requiring legal, conceptual and scientific investigation. To address them, certain populations seem most suited for neuroscientific investigation, especially addicts, psychopaths and people with brain damage, because people with these conditions disproportionately are at risk for and commit crimes. For example, in the nation's largest cities, from 55-90% of people arrested for a felony test positively for a controlled substance or alcohol, and 30% of state prisoners and 40% of federal prisoners are incarcerated on drug-related charges. It has also been estimated that more than 25% of violent criminals in prison share behavioral traits indicative of psychopathy, a condition marked by repetitive antisocial conduct and psychological deficits whose neural underpinnings have only recently become a topic of serious inquiry.
Relatedly, individuals apprehended and tried for criminal behavior face a legal system insufficiently equipped to assess and grapple with the new complexities increasingly brought to light by the neuroscience of behavior, and the new technologies that enable seemingly promising observations and assessments of a persons functioning brain. These new challenges explain why it is important to learn more about, and to improve, the processes by which judges, jurors, and others weigh neuroscientific evidence, assess guilt or innocence, and when appropriate impose sentence.
Each of these challenges for the legal system can be investigated with neuroscientific techniques. Neuroscientists have studied brain variation for a long time. They have made striking advances in understanding the mechanisms of brain abnormalities related to antisocial behavior. And they have gained deeper knowledge not only of the mechanisms of normal decision making, but also of the neural circuits that underlie desires and enable us to inhibit action. Though it remains to be seen, it is possible that after more of the gaps in existing knowledge are filled, neuroscience may be ready to be used by law in furtherance of existing legal goals.
For these reasons, Phase I of the Law and Neuroscience Project included two interdisciplinary networks, teaming legal scholars, neuroscientists, and others. These research networks are: (1) The Network on Criminal Responsibility and Prediction; and (2) The Network on Legal Decision Making. Each network is co-directed by at least one neuroscientist and one legal expert:
Each network met at least three times per year at the same time and place to facilitate inter-network collaboration and an Annual Conference was held in conjunction with one of the meetings. The initial goals were to assess the conceptual issues concerning the relation of neuroscience to law and to identify gaps in our current knowledge that need to be filled in order to inform legal decision makers and policy makers. When these issues were identified, the Project then engaged in legally-relevant neuroscience research targeted at important legal issues.
Phase I Network on Criminal Responsibility and Prediction (2007 - 2010)
What does it mean to hold a person criminally responsible for his or her actions? Do advances in neuroscience provide assistance in determining if certain individuals who suffer from mental illnesses, brain abnormalities, or other causes of potential diminished mental capacity deserve to be excused from responsibility? Further, do those advances help predict if people with abnormalities will behave dangerously or if they can be helped with new interventions? These questions form the heart of the research of the Network on Criminal Responsibility and Prediction. Persons suffering from addiction, psychopathy and other forms of brain damage make up a significant proportion of accused and convicted criminals and of those at risk for criminal behavior. Their brain conditions raise the critical questions identified above about responsibility, prediction, and treatment. Answers to such questions will doubtlessly have implications for assessing criminal responsibility in individuals who do not have abnormal brain conditions. So called normal individuals exist at various points on a continuum of brain and behavior categorizations, making distinct categorization difficult. A transcendent question is whether neuroscientific findings based on group averages or behavioral diagnoses can properly be applied to a particular individual before the court.
Along with defining the issues and conducting research, we addressed ethical and policy questions concerning these discoveries.
The Network took advantage of the large body of existing neuroscience research to determine what additional information will assist attorneys, judges and legal experts make accurate assessments of responsibility and accurate predictions about future dangerous conduct and potential for treatment. Accuracy in both types of decision is crucial to just outcomes. That determination will lead to scientific research to address those areas identified as both critical and lacking in information. More generally, new neuroscientific discoveries might well undermine many of the laws assumptions about human behavior that implicitly and explicitly guide legal policy. For example, if neuroscience can demonstrate that an addicts behavior is not fully under the addicts control, it may be unfair to hold the addict legally accountable for that behavior. At present, the criminal law does not excuse or mitigate the conduct of addicts, but neuroscience will unquestionably put increasing pressure on the moral and legal model of addiction that portrays it as within the addicts control and it may motivate a more medical response. As a further example, if psychopaths cannot appreciate moral wrongfulness, is it just to hold them accountable for the harms they inflict? Finally, if a patient with frontal lobe damage is prone to behavioral disinhibition, should he or she be blamed for impulsive, criminal actions?
The goals for research with addicts, psychopaths and people with brain damage were to understand the relation of their abnormal states to criminal behavior and risk, to develop reliable diagnostic procedures that courts may rely upon in assessing such individuals and predicting their future behavior, and to encourage the design of therapies and other interventions that might restore non-criminal functioning and thus benefit the individual and society.
The abnormalities that were studied are incredibly complex, and often co-occurring. Research was structured to acknowledge as many factors as possible in the etiology of the resulting antisocial behavior. Along with defining the issues and conducting research, we addressed ethical and policy questions concerning these discoveries. The appropriate use of neuroscience and resulting tools within general society were carefully considered.
The following experts served as members of a MacArthur Network on Criminal Responsibility and Prediction:
Neuroscientists
- Silvia Bunge, University of California, Berkeley
- Robert Desimone, MIT (co-director)
- Martha Farah, University of Pennsylvania
- Michael Gazzaniga, University of California, Santa Barbara (co-director)
- Yasmin Hurd, Mount Sinai School of Medicine
- Kent Kiehl, University of New Mexico
- Read Montague, Baylor College of Medicine
- William Newsome, Stanford University
- Charles O'Brien, University of Pennsylvania
- Scott Grafton, University of California, Santa Barbara
Legal Experts
- Richard Bonnie, University of Virginia
- Judge Gerard Lynch, U.S. District Judge, Southern District of New York
- Michael Moore (and philosophy), University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
- Stephen Morse, University of Pennsylvania (co-director)
- Amy Wax, University of Pennsylvania
Philosophers
- Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Dartmouth College (ex officio)
- Gary Watson, University of California, Riverside
- Gideon Yaffe (and law), University of Southern California
Research Fellow
Phase I Network on Legal Decision Making (2007 - 2010)
Once a crime is committed, various actors in the legal system need to make decisions about whom to arrest and prosecute, how to manage the hearings and trials, whether to convict, and when appropriate how great a sentence to impose. At the intersections of these many choices, the Network on Legal Decision Making had two research themes.
Results of this research may eventually enable improvements in the fair and effective administration of criminal justice.
The first research theme addressed neuroscientific evidence. Because the use of neuroscientific evidence by attorneys is growing, ensuring appropriate introduction and assessment of such evidence is a pressing task. This required gathering information about precisely how neuroscience is currently being used in courtrooms, assessing those uses, and then making subsequent recommendations about the proper role and uses of neuroscience in the courtroom. Network members consequently researched the vast set of cases in which neuroscientific evidence has been offered in court. Research work also ascertained experimentally the effects on juror decision making of different kinds of, and contexts for, neuroscientific evidence. And the Network investigated and evaluated the potential relevance of neuroscience to a better understanding of memory, and the potential use of neuroscientific techniques for detecting deception.
The second research theme addressed the guilt assessments and sentencing decisions of jurors and judges respectively. In an effort to better understand and perhaps improve decision making in criminal justice contexts, members carried out research to better detect (and perhaps counteract) biases relating to race or prior criminal record and also to better understand how people go about assessing the blameworthiness of defendants and how punishment decisions are made. Results of this research may eventually enable improvements in the fair and effective administration of criminal justice. The following experts served as members of the MacArthur Foundations Research Network on Legal Decision Making:
Neuroscientists
- Judy Illes, University of British Columbia
- Rene Marois, Vanderbilt University
- Elizabeth Phelps, New York University
- Marc Raichle, Washington University in St Louis (co-director)
- Jeff Schall, Vanderbilt University
- Anthony Wagner, Stanford University
Legal Scholars and Judges
- Kathryn Abrams, University of California, Berkeley
- David Faigman, University of California, Hastings College of the Law
- Judge William Fletcher, US Ninth Circuit, San Francisco
- Hank Greely, Stanford Law School (co-director)
- Judge Morris Hoffman, Denver District Court
- Owen Jones, Vanderbilt University (co-director)
- Susan M. Wolf, University of Minnesota Law School
Philosophers
- Joshua Greene, Harvard University
- Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Dartmouth College (ex officio)
Research Fellow
- Francis X. Shen, University of California, Santa Barbara