Abstract
Whereas brain-reading technologies could, in principle, strengthen forensic psychiatric evaluations, deploying brain-reading in this context also raises fundamental, interwoven ethical and legal questions. Although both in ethics and in the law similar questions arise in this respect, the legal and ethical debates tend to be separated from each other. This chapter aims to provide some further direction on how ethics and the law could learn from each other in the debate on forensic brain-reading. We argue that although ethical analysis can be very informative for the law, we should be careful in extrapolating ethical arguments into the legal debate. Conversely, legal doctrines can—and should—sometimes inform ethics as well.
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Notes
- 1.
Within the context of this chapter, we will not address the relationship between ethics and law more generally; we focus on human rights, where a close connection exists between legal and ethical principles and values, as well as scholarly discussions about them.
- 2.
- 3.
- 4.
We focus in this chapter on the assessment of defendants, but another important task of forensic psychiatry concerns treatment of forensic psychiatric patients, see section “Trust”.
- 5.
- 6.
In our legal considerations, we focus on the ECHR.
- 7.
- 8.
ECtHR (GC) 5 September 2017, appl.no. 61496/08 (Bărbulescu/Romania), § 70; ECtHR (GC) 15 March 2012, appl.nos. 4149/04 and 41029/04 (Aksu/Turkey), § 58.
- 9.
ECtHR 3 September 2015, appl.no. 10161/13 (M. and M. v. Croatia), § 171.
- 10.
ECtHR (GC) 16 December 2010, appl.no. 25579/05 (A, B and C v. Ireland), § 216; ECtHR 29 April 2002, appl.no. 2346/02 (Pretty v. UK), § 61–67; ECtHR 11 July 2002, appl.no. 25680/94 (I./UK), § 70–73.
- 11.
ECtHR 3 October 2008, appl.no. 35228/03 (Bogumil/Portugal), § 71.
- 12.
See e.g. ECtHR 3 June 2010, appl.nos. 42837/06, 3237/07, 3269/07, 35793/07 and 6099/08 (Dimitras and others/Greece); ECtHR 2 May 2010, appl.no. 21924/05 (Sinan Işık/Turkey).
- 13.
ECtHR (GC) 1 July 2014, appl.no. 43835/11 (S.A.S./France), § 55. See also ECtHR (GC) 26 April 2016, appl.no. 62649/10 (İzzettin Doğan and others v. Turkey), § 68.
- 14.
E.g. EComHR 7 April 1994, appl.no. 20871/92 (Strohal/Austria); EComHR 1 March 1993, appl.no. 17488/90 (Goodwin/UK); EComHR 13 October 1992 appl.no. 16002/90 (K./Austria).
- 15.
ECtHR (GC) 3 April 2012, appl.no. 41723/06 (Gillberg/Sweden), § 86.
- 16.
See inter alia ECtHR 26 April 1979, appl.no. 6538/74 (Sunday Times/UK).
- 17.
Supreme Court of the Netherlands 18 September 2007, ECLI:NL:HR:2007:BA3610. Cf. Supreme Court of the Netherlands 25 September 2012, ECLI:NL:HR:2012:BX4269.
- 18.
Notice that in Japan the concealed information test is not applied with a brain-reading technique, but with a polygraph, measuring physiological reactions of the autonomous nervous system.
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Ligthart, S., Kooijmans, T., Meynen, G. (2021). ‘Brain-Reading’ in Criminal Justice and Forensic Psychiatry: Towards an Integrative Legal-Ethical Approach. In: Ligthart, S., van Toor, D., Kooijmans, T., Douglas, T., Meynen, G. (eds) Neurolaw. Palgrave Studies in Law, Neuroscience, and Human Behavior. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-69277-3_6
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