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Posted by NELB Staff on 11/29/2012 at 04:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Should the Late Stage Demented be Punished for Past Crimes? by Annette Dufner has been published in Criminal Law and Philosophy, Online First™:
Abstract
The paper investigates whether it is plausible to hold the late stage demented criminally responsible for past actions. The concern is based on the fact that policy makers in the United States and in Britain are starting to wonder what to do with prison inmates in the later stages of dementia who do not remember their crimes anymore. The problem has to be expected to become more urgent as the population ages and the number of dementia patients increases. This paper argues that the late-stage demented should not be punished for past crimes. Applicable theories of punishment, especially theories with an appropriate expressivist, or communicative element, fail to justify the imprisonment of the late-stage demented. Further imprisonment would require a capacity for comprehension on the part of the punished, and, under certain narrowly specified conditions, even a capacity to be at least in principle capable of recalling the crime again.
Posted by NELB Staff on 11/23/2012 at 07:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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Last Edition's Most Popular Article:
In The Popular Press
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Posted by Adam Kolber on 11/23/2012 at 01:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
TMZ states: "Camacho is reportedly brain-dead ... and doctors have said he will need a miracle to survive." Well, either he's not really brain dead, or he's going to need a bring-the-dead-back-to-life miracle.
UPDATE: In a new entry, TMZ continues the confusion: "According to the rep, Camacho's family made the decision to remove him from life support after doctors declared he was brain dead." Once doctors declare him dead, the family's rights to continue life support are severely curtailed; at least that's the way things generally work in the fifty states. Maybe they have rights to keep up life support for some number of hours for religious rituals or the like. I would doubt they would have much more say than that. So declaring that the family "made a decision" at least implies that the family had a substantial say in the matter when, in fact, they probably did not. TMZ reinforces the misperception that brain death is not really death. (More precisely, the law treats brain death as death; of course, one can always disagree.)
Posted by Adam Kolber on 11/21/2012 at 03:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Recently Posted to SSRN:
"When Does Knowledge Become Intent? Perceiving the Minds of Wrongdoers"
Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, Vol. 9, Issue 4, pp. 859-892, 2012
PAM MUELLER, Princeton University - Department of Psychology
LAWRENCE M. SOLAN, Brooklyn Law School
JOHN M. DARLEY, Princeton University
In a series of experimental studies, we asked people to assign appropriate civil and/or criminal liability to individuals who cause harm with various culpable states of mind and kinds of knowledge. The studies are principally aimed at two related issues. First, do people actually separate the various states of mind conceptually? How much knowledge, and what kind of knowledge, regarding something that may go wrong (understanding risk) is sufficient to count as knowing that something will go wrong (having knowledge legally equivalent to intent)? Second, to the extent that people distinguish among the states of mind that help define normative behavior, how much do those distinctions contribute to people's judgments of civil liability? Our studies show that people are able to make explicit distinctions about the states of mind of others that more or less correspond to legally relevant categories. Yet, when asked to assign consequences, their “hot” moral judgments play a larger role than do their “cold” cognitive categorizations.
Posted by NELB Staff on 11/17/2012 at 01:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Posted by NELB Staff on 11/13/2012 at 02:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
See here (though the piece doesn't say as much about the pain finding as its title suggests it would; there's a bit more in the video). We'll probably have to wait to find out more about repeatability and the like. But, nevertheless, it appears that the experiential future creeps forward....
(Hat tip: Jennifer Chandler)
Posted by Adam Kolber on 11/13/2012 at 09:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Posted by NELB Staff on 11/08/2012 at 04:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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Last Edition's Most Popular Article:
In The Popular Press
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Posted by NELB Staff on 11/08/2012 at 04:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Vanderbilt is offering a fantastic new scholarship to a student who simultaneously pursues a J.D. (in law, of course) and a Ph.D. (in neuroscience) at Vanderbilt:
The Vanderbilt JD/PhD joint degree in Law and Neuroscience is happy to announce that one full-tuition law school scholarship has been put into place this year for a person admitted to both the Vanderbilt Brain Institute and Vanderbilt Law School who will begin the JD/PhD track in Neuroscience in Fall 2013.
The application deadline is April 1, but see here for more information, details, and restrictions. This is a great opportunity!
Posted by Adam Kolber on 11/01/2012 at 06:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Recently Posted to SSRN:
"Lie-Detection, Neuroscience, and the Law of Evidence"
FREDERICK SCHAUER, University of Virginia School of Law
This paper, prepared for the “State of the Art” Law and Neuroscience Conference at the Rutgers (Camden) University School of Law, has two goals. One is to describe comprehensively the current court cases, scientific research, academic literature, and controversies about the potential use of Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) for detecting deception in court and other forensic contexts. The other is to suggest that the question of the admissibility of fMRI deception evidence in court cannot be thought of as an exclusively scientific question. The appropriate use or non-use of science in the legal system involves inevitably normative questions about the appropriate levels of accuracy, reliability and validity, questions that must be answered in light of the goals of the legal system and the particular purposes to which the science would be put. The answers require getting the science right, and thus require the involvement of science and scientists, but the ultimate question of when and how the scientific conclusions so produced will be used is a question of legal policy as to which neither scientists (nor, for that matter, lawyers) should be given exclusive authority. Thus, although explicitly focused on law and neuroscience, the paper implicitly addresses a pervading issue in science policy generally – is the use to which science shall or should be put an exclusively, or even partially, scientific question?
Posted by NELB Staff on 11/01/2012 at 04:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)