‘The technology measures the electrical brain activity of defendants and witnesses, and should improve the legal system's ability to determine who is telling the truth and who is not,’ said Law Professor Francis Shen, the study's lead author and director of the Neurolaw Lab, a collaborative at the University exploring the legal implications of neuroscience.
Application - a step closer says report
The idea of using neuroscience in courts has been in discussion for around two decades but the new study suggests that the application is a step closer. The study includes results from multiple experiments examining the effect of neuroscientific evidence on subjects' evaluation of a fictional criminal fact pattern, while manipulating the strength of the non-neuroscientific evidence.
'Exciting'
Manipulating expert evidence and the strength of the non-neuroscientific facts against the defendant, it was discovered that the neuroscientific evidence was not as powerful a predictor as the overall strength of the case in determining outcomes. ‘Our new interdisciplinary research is exciting because it's some of the first to empirically test how this would work in practice.’
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