

Should Our Brains Count as Courtroom Evidence? - DiabloD3
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/should-our-brains-count-as-courtroom-evidence

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zaroth
I didn't know the recidivism rate was that high! 77 percent is unbelievable.
Even higher in younger populations... I wonder how much of this is based on
the system being rigged against parolees, but looking at the stats, while a
significant number were drug offenses, for example, which might go undetected
for a non-felon, about 1/3rd were property and 1/3rd violent.

The skeptic in me thinks, almost like something about the experience of going
to prison makes one more likely to be a criminal. The optimist in me thinks we
should be focusing less on predicting recidivism and more time trying to
prevent it. There's a huge economic incentive to rehabilitation, but of course
the system can't get out of its own way and treat prisoners like reformable
human beings that we actually want contributing positively to society sometime
in the near future. The unfortunate reality is some of these felons really are
scum of the earth and can never safely be released.

It would be pretty interesting to find better ways of 'binning' felons to try
to provide a more reformative atmosphere for the ones that could actually make
it out the other side and back into productive society. Brain scan could be
the _least_ biased way to do it if we can get the science down. The whole
things sounds terribly problematic though.

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rl3
No.

Or at least, not in a manner that prejudices defendants.

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spacemanmatt
If someone could prove that recollection is reliable, that might change things
for me. But I agree with you.

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charonn0
This might be acceptable if the scan was entirely voluntary and optional, and
the results could not be used to increase punishment (reduction is OK.)

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rl3
I agree, and this works with our current level of technology. The problem is
when the technology advances far beyond what we have today.

For the sake of argument, assume we have the technology to read someone's
thoughts beyond any shadow of a doubt. Innocent people are no longer convicted
as a result. Great, right? Well, not exactly.

Even if such technology was used only to acquit, the very fact that a
defendant was still undergoing proceedings would be an implicit form of guilt.

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teslaberry
pseudoscience.

one step removed from phrenology.

we do not have a comprehesive theory of the brain yet and so we are using a
libary of fairly unreliable pattern matching to make conclusions.

