In this issue of The Journal, Dr. Peter Ash offers the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law some ideas on developmentally informed assessment of criminal culpability during adolescence. After highlighting issues that complicate the definition and assessment of criminal culpability, Ash lists 10 constructs that he believes should be carefully considered by forensic clinicians in developing...

In this contribution an empirical approach is used to gain more insight into the relationship between neuroscience and criminal law. The focus is on case law in the Netherlands. Neuroscientific information and techniques have found their way into the courts of the Netherlands. Furthermore, following an Italian case in which a mentally ill offender received a penalty reduction in part because of...

Much of the public debate surrounding the intersection of neuroscience and criminal law is based on assumptions about how prosecutors and defense attorneys differ in their use of neuroscience evidence. For example, according to some commentators, the defense’s use of neuroscience evidence will abdicate criminals of all responsibility for their offenses. In contrast, the prosecution’s use of tha...

The mother lode of criminal responsibility scholarship is a unitary theory of criminal excuses, that is, a persuasive normative account of why the criminal law adjudges actors to be blameless despite their having engaged in prohibited conduct. The law’s other criminal defenses do not readily lend themselves to unitary normative accounts or, if they do, they rest on normative accounts that are s...

This article presents the results of a study of 894 criminal defendants referred by Virginia courts for evaluation of competency to stand trial or criminal responsibility. All evaluations were conducted on an outpatient basis by mental health professionals who had received specialized training in forensic evaluation. Findings as to the referral questions posed, the criminal offenses charged, an...

due to the necessity of support to minor females until maturity, and the compassionate view of the sacred legislator to her ungracious acts, the main attention in islamic criminal jurisprudence is to her legal status either as the defendant or as the accused. while the dynamic islamic jurisprudence considers the minors with no criminal responsibility, presently this progressive islamic criminal...

The evolution of information technologies have brought us to a point where we are confronted with the existence of agents computational entities which are able to act autonomously with little or no human intervention. And their behavior can damage individual or collective interests that are protected by criminal law. Based on the analysis of different models of criminal responsibility of legal ...

Both the concepts of addiction (drug-addiction) and of responsibility are not universally crystallized and accepted. Even the terms in Greek language are disputable: Toxicomania or exartisis (dependence)? Enoche (guilt) or katalogismos (imputation)? Nosology and Criminal Law disciplines do not share necessarily common definitions about. The question here is if addiction implies merely incapacit...