fMRI scans convict woman of murder in India

Scientists have long tried to build the ultimate lie detector using brain imaging and brain recording techniques. Some research has been able to use EEG waves to detect when you’re about to make an error in a basic button-pressing task using an ERP component named the Error-Related Negativity. More recently, brain activation patterns have been used to predict whether a participant will perform one mathematical operation or another (Haynes, et al., 2007).

Neuroscience, however, has not progressed far enough to accurately read someone’s mind as to whether they are lying or telling the truth. However, one Indian researcher has used his neuroscience methodology in a murder case in India, and evidence gained from his brain scans were one of the cornerstones of the guilty verdict and life sentence of the defendant.

From the article:

For years, scientists have peered into the brain and sought to identify deception. They have shot infrared beams through liars’ heads, placed them in giant magnetic resonance imaging machines and used scanners to track their eyeballs. Since the Sept. 11 attacks, the United States has plowed money into brain-based lie detection in the hope of producing more fruitful counterterrorism investigations.

The technologies, generally regarded as promising but unproved, have yet to be widely accepted as evidence — except in India, where in recent years judges have begun to admit brain scans. But it was only in June, in a murder case in Pune, in Maharashtra State, that a judge explicitly cited a scan as proof that the suspect’s brain held “experiential knowledge” about the crime that only the killer could possess, sentencing her to life in prison.

This leads to huge ethical implications about the use of this technology. Worse yet, this methodology hasn’t even been reviewed by his peers in neuroscience, so no questions have been raised about how valid this technique is at all, let alone whether it should be used as a primary determination of guilt. Questions such as these have prompted the formation of the Neuroethics Society, a group of concerned neuroscientists who hope to set policy and explore issues with reading someone’s mind.

Hopefully this would never hold up in a U.S. Court, but I’m waiting for it to show up in an episode of Law & Order.