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Traumatic Brain Injury, Neuroscience, and the Legal System

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Abstract

This essay addresses the question: What is the probative value of including neuroscience data in court cases where the defendant might have had a traumatic brain injury (TBI)? That is, this essay attempts to articulate how well we can connect scientific data and clinical test results to the demands of the Daubert standard in the United States’ court system, and, given the fact that neuroimaging is already being used in our courts, what, if anything, we should do about this fact. Ultimately, I am not sure that there are completely satisfactory answers to this query at this particular time in our legal history. I briefly rehearse the recent use of brain research in our legal system, summarize how neuroscience data regarding TBI and its relation to poor behavioral outcomes are currently used in the courtroom, review challenges with using these data, and highlight fundamental tensions between how the legal system views the causes of behavior and how medicine, neuroscience, and psychology do. Until these tensions are resolved, it is unclear the place neuroscience data should have in courts.

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Notes

  1. These numbers rival those who served in Viet Nam (approximately three million).

  2. Despite what is written in Daubert, all of science is not cut from the same cloth. In particular, Daubert holds that, in order to be admissible, courts should consider whether the evidence can be and has been tested, whether it has been published in peer-reviewed venues, whether there is a known error rate, and whether the scientific community generally accepts it. The tension between the Daubert standards and the practice of the mind and brain sciences can be especially challenging (cf., [91]). How would we understand the error rate in an evaluation of future dangerousness, for example? The legal system has not been completely unaware of the special difficulties in admitting expert behavioral or brain-based testimony though. Kumho v. Carmichael stressed that the most important test for admissibility is “relevance and reliability” [92]. Canavan concluded that clinical experience could be considered reliable and that observation was a genuine scientific technique, if the relevant scientific community deemed it such [93].

  3. I would like to thank Scott Bresler and Brock Hunter for their conversations around the issues raised in this article. Their discussions helped clarify my thinking substantially. I would also like to thank two anonymous referees for their comments; they pushed me to make this essay a much better one.

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  1. Professor of Philosophy, Psychology, and Psychiatry and Behavioral Neuroscience, Scholar-in-Residence, Weaver Institute for Law and Psychiatry, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH, USA

    Valerie Gray Hardcastle

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Hardcastle, V.G. Traumatic Brain Injury, Neuroscience, and the Legal System. Neuroethics 8, 55–64 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12152-014-9221-4

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