In this book journalist Kevin Davis makes a very detailed research that questions many of the traditional assumptions about free will and legal responsabilities that have traditionally ruled the criteria used in court rooms to determine the extent of guilt and especially the amount of punishment (and/or therapy, or rehabilitation) that defendants with "broken brains" really deserve.
All this in view of a new breaking factor in the interpretation of human behavior: the use of neuroscientific data in trials.
Human Behavior is the subject to which I have been devoting my interest and study during several years now, and thus I immediately sensed the importance of reading this book.
With the advance of the technology available to study the living brain, like fMRI and PET Scanning, among other tests, we are at the beginning of an era that will, some day, allow us to get a very detailed picture of what is going on in a brain and whether this is a healthy (or "normal") brain or a pathological one, and if this distinction is a valid excuse in legal terms. We are still quite far from a thorough and detailed analysis capacity, and this has been made evident in court rooms, as Davis tells us in his book, in the words of several experts that are well aware of the limitations of the available info, that is still not enough to fully explain behavior in individual cases. On the contrary, it has led to some abuse in terms of trying to over apply neuroscientific data in as many cases as possible.
Notwithstanding these limitations, the importance of brain study can not be ignored, as it will be considered more each day in every aspect of human behavior analysis, surely not restricted to court room instances.
Up to now, to declare a defendant not guilty for a severe mental disorder has been restricted to the psychiatric realm, and only in the past few years has this new approach been used in court rooms, claiming that the organic study of a brain also has a place in the explanation of the criminal conduct. As I have stated before, despite its modest contribution to trial outcomes, this is just the beginning.
In his book, Kevin Davis makes a detailed analysis of Herbert Weinstein´s case, a man that killed his wife in a sudden anger reaction. With no previous violent behavior whatsoever, Weinstein was diagnosed with the presence of a huge cyst in the frontal lobe of his brain, which might have had some participation in a diminished auto control capacity, and thus might explain to some extent his extreme reaction.
Davis also depicts another very important growing body of evidence regarding Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE), a condition that affects people who sustain repeated impacts in the head, such as boxers and american football players, that have been analysed both in vivo and post mortem, and where a very important neurological damage has been established. Famous players that have gone into very violent behaviors that have led them to stand trials, have been studied and found to have severe organic alterations in their brains.
Kevin Davis book "The Brain Defense" is a fundamental contribution to place in the minds of all of us, a relevant and trascendent subject, the importance of organic brain disfunction, as main cause or at least participant factor in the triggering of violent behavior, and places a big question in the appropiate interpretation of "full free will" and responsability of defendants.
My interest in the real determinants of human behavior, subject about which I have written several articles and chapters both in spanish and english, and that can be linked from this blog, goes well beyond the law and court room environment, but with no doubt Kevin Davis contribution with this book will be of primary relevance, for all its implications, present and future.
My congratulations for a great work!
