(Smash) Narrator: How useful is brain science when it comes to real criminal cases? Can it help shape our legal systems' ideas on culpability and sentencing? Consider the case of Brian Dugan.
The child of alcoholics, his mother frequently beat him until she wore herself out. When he wet his bed, he was forced to sleep in the soiled sheets. Harsh discipline didn't stop him from burning down the family garage, or setting small animals on fire. He led a very psychopathic lifestyle from an early age. He had all sorts of the developmental triggers and all sorts of the same problems that was here in all these classic stories. Narrator: In his mid-twenties https://www.casinoslots.co.nz/lucky-nugget-casino-review, Dugan was arrested for the rape and murder of a 7-year-old girl. Later, he admitted to killing two others. He was convicted by a jury and faced the death penalty. In a bid to save him from a lethal injection, his defence attorneys called in Kent Kiehl to examine Dugan's brain. The only question before the jury in that trial was does he deserve to go back to prison for life, or does he deserve to be on death row? And so, we did brain scans on him, and we studied him, and we compared him to our databases of other inmates, and he, as expected, his brain looked just like all the other psychopaths that we've studied, and I testified to the differences in his brain structure to what we know about psychopathy, and to what that might potentially mean for, you know, the judicial system. Narrator: Kiehl's evidence seemed to have swayed the jury. They came back with a life sentence. A judge overturned that decision for the death penalty, but the State of Illinois eventually repealed the death penalty, and Dugan still remains in prison. It was the first time in a US courtroom that functional MRI scans were used to help support a psychiatric diagnosis. I think that in these big special cases, like these death penalty cases, that MRI scans are becoming quite common, because if there is something wrong in their brain, if there is a hole there, or a tumour, or something maybe more sophisticated, and analysis shows something else is wrong, then juries find that to be usually mitigating and they sentence them to life sentence versus death, and that's, of course, what the defence attorney is trying to do. (smash) Narrator: There may be many biological reasons why people are not responsible for their crimes. (smash) (smash) (alarm sounding) But according to Eagleman, that doesn't mean we allow dangerous offenders back on the streets. It doesn't let anyone off the hook. The legal system says are you guilty or not guilty? Did you pull the trigger or did you not pull the trigger? So, people who are violent and aggressive and so on, they have to be taken off the streets to protect the more general society, whether or not we would say it is their fault in some deep fundamental freewill sense. When someone does something horrible, we may have this impulse that says, you know, lock them up, throw them in prison, and the nastier that prison is the better, this person did a horrible thing and they should really suffer. Narrator: Joshua Greene says that society's desire for punishment goes deeper than just wanting to take the wrongdoer off the streets. In fact, he says our brains are wired to want revenge. Revenge tastes good. There's that evolutionary and a philosophical rationale for having that taste and abiding by it, because a world in which people don't punish is world in which people can get away with transgressions very easily. Narrator: But Greene maintains the more we learn about the brain, the more likely we are to soften our desire for revenge, and he has evidence for that. In a controlled experiment, he gave subjects a passage to read about neuroscience that rejected freewill and gave a mechanistic view of the human brain, then they were made jurors in a hypothetical murder case, and asked what kind of sentence the murderer should receive.
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7/6/2022 11:21:39 pm
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