Professor Deborah Denno was interviewed in an article by CAFE, where she shared her insight on the intersections of neuroscience and criminal law.
Advancements in the study of the human brain promise to transform our criminal justice system … To help us understand how neuroscientific evidence is used in courts today and what’s around the corner, I spoke with Professor Deborah Denno, founding director of the Neuroscience & Law Center at Fordham Law School.
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Neuroscience evidence is submitted in criminal cases in about three major ways. Number one is it can be admitted at the guilt phase to determine whether or not a defendant is guilty or innocent, in other words, whether they are privy to the insanity defense or diminished capacity, whether we’re going to convict them of a crime.
The second major way is at the sentencing phase. This occurs a lot in death penalty cases. When you’re trying to evaluate whether or not, say, a jury is going to sentence a defendant to death or not, neuroscience evidence comes in, in a major way, to explain why the defendant did what they did and why we may want to sympathize with them or better understand the reasons for their extreme violence, or something to that effect.
A third way it enters the criminal justice system, which I’ve found in my research, is it’s used by prosecutors to measure the degree of injury that a victim might have experienced. These kinds of cases predominantly are shaken baby cases.