As a followup, I found this article in which it is described that a “brain scan” was used to try and convince a jury not to sentance a person to death for the brutal rape and murder of Jessica Lunsford.

Yesterday, as reported here, the jury voted 10-2 in favor of the death penalty for the convicted killer, John Couey. These articles also report how Couey’s IQ has been tested in the high 60’s to low 70’s, and of how he was severely beaten as a child for bedwetting. Evidently the severe nature of the crime was enough for the jury to want the most severe punishment applied.

The test for “insanity” historically has been almost impossibly high. The McNaughton Rule, which is still generally used in US and UK criminal law, requires that for one to be “not guilty by reason of insanity” that

“…at the time of committing the act, the accused was laboring under such a defect of reason, from disease of the mind, as not to know the nature and quality of the act he was doing or, if he did know it, that he did not know what he was doing was wrong.”

Basically, as long as a person has “any” sense of right or wrong, no matter how little impulse control he has, or understanding for the permanancy of his actions, he is held fully culpable under the law. One good thing that may happen would be for a bit more understanding of different conditions that might compromise one’s judgement when violating the law.

The possible negative consequences are if we start using brain scans to determine if one qualifies as “normal”, and then start denying full rights of citizenship to those not deemed “normal”.