Integrating Brain Science and Law: Neuroscientific Evidence and Legal Perspectives on Protecting Individual Liberties

Abstract

Advances in neuroscientific techniques have found increasingly broader applications, including in legal neuroscience (or “neurolaw”), where experts in the brain sciences are called to testify in the courtroom. But does the incursion of neuroscience into the legal sphere constitute a threat to individual liberties? And what legal protections are there against such threats? In this paper, we outline individual rights as they interact with neuroscientific methods. We then proceed to examine the current uses of neuroscientific evidence, and ultimately determine whether the rights of the individual are endangered by such approaches. Based on our analysis, we conclude that while federal evidence rules constitute a substantial hurdle for the use of neuroscientific evidence, more ethical safeguards are needed to protect against future violations of fundamental rights. Finally, we assert that it will be increasingly imperative for the legal and neuroscientific communities to work together to better define the limits, capabilities, and intended direction of neuroscientific methods applicable for use in law.

Transnational Patients: Practical and Ethical Implications for Medical Practices and Health Promotions Policy

“…To allow sharing of methods used by successful local programs with a broader community, we propose a global database of best practices and guidelines for transnational health‐care promotions, which is aimed at improving health care and well‐being across diverse communities. Of course, developing and implementing a global database is not without current and potential problems: it would require custodial services to maintain security and probity of the extent, type, and basis of information contributed and accessed; would need to consider issues of informational provenance; and there are concerns about the ethico‐legal issues fostered by the relative meanings, interpretation, and uses of such information in various social and political settings (Akram & Giordano, ; DiEuliis & Giordano, ; Kraft & Giordano, ).…”

Neuroethics of Non-primary Brain Computer Interface: Focus on Potential Military Applications

“…Non-invasive BCI technology for detection of deception shows greater portability and ease of use compared to functional neuroimaging for the same ends. Ethical analysis of forensic neuroimaging in the literature ( Hyman, 2010 ; Moreno and Parashar, 2012 ) can be broadly applied to non-invasive BCI; within the psychophysiological literature regarding EEG-based forensic techniques, however, the main consideration has been admissibility in US court rather than ethics ( Rosenfeld et al, 2013 ; Kraft and Giordano, 2017 ). There is no current international consensus on whether an individual enjoys any expectation of electrocerebral privacy, and only recently has there been any call to apply protections to electrocerebral or neuroimaging data similar to those in place for genomic data ( Ienca and Andorno, 2017 ).…”

The Future of Cognitive Neuroscience

“…Brainwaves can be used to prove the identity of a person [14]). The development of brain fingerprinting also opens a new wave of police interrogation methods (Kraft & Giordano, 2017). It is not easy to prove whether a suspect is guilty or innocent.…”