What Does Recent Neuroscience Tell Us about Criminal Responsibility?

Authors

Uri Maoz, Chapman UniversityFollow
Gideon Yaffe, Yale Law School

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

12-30-2015

Abstract

A defendant is criminally responsible for his action only if he is shown to have engaged in a guilty act—actus reus (eg for larceny, voluntarily taking someone else’s property without permission)—while possessing a guilty mind—mens rea (eg knowing that he had taken someone else’s property without permission, intending not to return it)—and lacking affirmative defenses (eg the insanity defense or self-defense). We therefore first review neuroscientific studies that bear on the nature of voluntary action, and so could, potentially, tell us something of importance about the actus reus of crimes.Then we look at studies of intention, perception of risk, and other mental states that matter to the mens rea of crimes. And, last, we discuss studies of self-control, which might be relevant to some formulations of the insanity defense. As we show, to date, very little is known about the brain that is of significance for understanding criminal responsibility. But there is no reason to think that neuroscience cannot provide evidence that will challenge our understanding of criminal responsibility.

Comments

This article was originally published in Journal of Law and the Biosciences, volume 3, issue 1, in 2015. DOI:10.1093/jlb/lsv051

Recommended Citation

Maoz, U., & Yaffe, G. (2015). What does recent neuroscience tell us about criminal responsibility? Journal of Law and the Biosciences, 3(1): 120-139. doi:10.1093/jlb/lsv051

Copyright

The authors

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.