Responsibility and Punishment

Responsibility and punishment: whose mind? A response.

Cognitive neuroscience is challenging the Anglo-American approach to criminal responsibility. Critiques, in this issue and elsewhere, are pointing out the deeply flawed psychological assumptions underlying the legal tests for mental incapacity. The critiques themselves, however, may be flawed in looking, as the tests do, at the psychology of the offender. Introducing the strategic structure of ...

Unmitigated Punishment: Adolescent Criminal Responsibility and LWOP Sentences

Youthfulness, responsibility and punishment Admonishing adolescents in criminal court

This article describes interaction in a criminal (adult) court in which adolescents are punished. As a result of the particular set of courtroom dynamics and the youthfulness of the defendants in this court, two potentially conflicting ideas about punishment are expressed concurrently: (1) proportionality, and (2) reduced culpability among youth. I demonstrate how judges talk to adolescent defe...

Effects of Behavioral Genetic Evidence on Perceptions of Criminal Responsibility and Appropriate Punishment.

Demonstrations of a link between genetic variants and criminal behavior have stimulated increasing use of genetic evidence to reduce perceptions of defendants' responsibility for criminal behavior and to mitigate punishment. However, because only limited data exist regarding the impact of such evidence on decision makers and the public at large, we recruited a representative sample of the U.S. ...

Penalties and sex reassignment surgery (SRS) after a punishment crime

One of important subject and discussion issue in medical sciences that caused occurrence of new legal and jurisprudence issues in the society, is sex reassignment surgery (SRS). Although in the past, these discussions have been existed more or less, nowadays due to technological progress and medical science achievements, new aspects of this subject have emerged. Despite different views concerni...