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How to Advance the Debate on the Criminal Responsibility of Antisocial Offenders

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Abstract

Should offenders with psychopathy or those exhibiting extreme forms of antisocial behaviour be considered criminally responsible? The current debate seems to have reached a stalemate. Several scholars have argued that neuropsychological data on individuals with psychopathy might be relevant for determining their criminal responsibility. However, relying on such data has not produced a consensus among legal scholars and philosophers on whether individuals with psychopathy should be excused from responsibility. We offer a diagnosis about why this debate has reached a standoff. We argue that part of the problem is that psychopathy, being a syndrome-based category, is too heterogeneous and thus offers low prospects for being integrated with neuropsychological data that might support significant conclusions about the criminal responsibility of individuals with psychopathy. Moreover, the construct of psychopathy was not originally devised to discriminate criminally accountable from unaccountable antisocial individuals. To overcome these difficulties and advance the debate, we extend a currently less discussed theoretical framework for bridging biopsychology and the law that focuses on neuropsychological constructs, domains, and processes that directly measure capacities of offenders that are relevant for criminal responsibility, without necessarily relying on mediating syndrome-based constructs. The novelty of our contribution is that the biopsychological bases of exculpation can be further developed and used for determining more fine-grained categorisations of antisocial personality types. We show how this framework provides guidelines for interdisciplinary research that can significantly advance our understanding of the preconditions for criminal responsibility and help the legal practice of ascribing or withholding it.

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Notes

  1. This issue is further complicated by studies suggesting that there is no unified cognitive capacity for delivering moral judgments (for discussion, see [38]). This might also explain why empirical research failed to provide sufficient evidence for general deficits in moral understanding associated with the construct of psychopathy [39].

  2. In this respect, our approach can be characterized as sharing the general principles of RDoC and applying them to the legal domain. However, it is important to note that we only adopt an “RDoC-style” approach, as we want to remain uncommitted about the specifics of the RDoC model in clinical practice. In fact, there are several RDoC-style proposals in the psychological and psychiatric literature (e.g., biocognitive fingerprinting, computational psychiatry, etc.) that, while sharing the fundamental principles of RDoC, implement them in varying manners (see, e.g., [26, 61]).

  3. The difference may also be reflected in some of the desiderata for forensic and clinical categories. Generally, we would want clinical and forensic constructs that are valid and reliable. However, in certain contexts, the trade-off between their sensitivity and specificity might differ between clinical and forensic cases. Sensitivity refers to the ability of a construct to accurately identify individuals who have a particular condition or characteristic, while specificity refers to the ability of a construct to accurately identify individuals who do not have the condition or characteristic. In a forensic setting, specificity might be more important, as justice requires that it is better for a guilty person to go free than for an innocent person to be punished. If legal constructs are not specific enough, they run the risk of including innocent individuals within their scope. For instance, if a forensic DNA test used to identify a suspect from a crime scene is not specific enough and produces a false positive result, an innocent person might be falsely accused and wrongly convicted of a crime they did not commit. In the clinical case, sensitivity might be more important, as the primary goal of the clinical system is to accurately identify and diagnose individuals who may need treatment. For instance, if a mammogram lacks sensitivity, it can potentially result in delayed diagnosis and treatment of breast cancer, which may cause a patient to miss the chance for early detection and treatment, significantly decreasing their chances of survival.

  4. There are intriguing philosophical questions regarding the understanding of relations between constructs, domains, and measurable processes. For instance, we will later discuss inhibition as a significant domain of self-control. This raises the question of whether inhibition and its associated mental processes provide causal underpinnings for self-control or if they are constitutively related (for empirically grounded discussion, see [73]). Answering these questions requires addressing broader issues in the philosophy of psychology/mind, particularly concerning levels of psychological explanation and their ontology (for contrasting perspectives in the legal context, see [72, 74]). In our discussion, we need not commit to the precise metaphysics of these relations. We will minimally presuppose that the relevant domains and associated mental processes (to be determined collectively by philosophers, legal scholars, and mental health practitioners) should provide at least necessary conditions for the proper functioning of legally relevant mental capacities.

  5. It should also be noted that there is some uncertainty about whether inhibition should be understood as a process or an outcome of goal-directed behaviour (for discussion, see [73]). We will remain neutral about these issues by construing attention as a capacity that might be subserved by different processes.

  6. A reviewer has noted that our method may be relevant to other categories of mental disorders, which aligns with our RDoC-style approach for reconsidering traditional psychiatric categories in forensic sciences. For instance, the specific type of inhibitory control dysfunction that may excuse individuals from accountability could be present across various conventional categories, such as bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and autism spectrum disorder, in addition to antisocial personality disorder. Although this has implications for our approach, exploring these other categories is beyond the scope of this paper. It is worth noting, though, that where these other categories are associated with severe forms of antisocial behaviour, our general approach can be straightforwardly applied to them as well (see, e.g., [89]).

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Funding

This paper is an outcome of the project Responding to antisocial personalities in a democratic society (RAD), http://rad.ffri.hr/en/, that is funded by the Croatian Science Foundation (CSF – HRZZ) (PI: Luca Malatesti, grant IP-2018-01-3518).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Philosophy and Division of Cognitive Sciences, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Rijeka, Sveučilišna Avenija 4, 51000, Rijeka, Croatia

    Marko Jurjako & Luca Malatesti

  2. Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands

    Inti A. Brazil

  3. Forensic Psychiatric Centre Pompestichting, Division Diagnostics Research and Education, Nijmegen, The Netherlands

    Inti A. Brazil

Authors
  1. Marko Jurjako
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  2. Luca Malatesti
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  3. Inti A. Brazil
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Correspondence to Luca Malatesti.

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Jurjako, M., Malatesti, L. & Brazil, I.A. How to Advance the Debate on the Criminal Responsibility of Antisocial Offenders. Neuroethics 17, 1 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12152-023-09535-0

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