Indian Woman Convicted of Murder By Brain Scan

Kaseijin writes "Neuroscientist Champadi Raman Mukundan claims his Brain Electrical Oscillations Signature test is so accurate, it can tell whether a person committed or only witnessed an act. In June, an Indian judge agreed, using BEOS to find a woman guilty of killing her former fiancé. Scientific experts are calling the decision 'ridiculous' and 'unconscionable,' protesting that Mukundan's work has not even been peer reviewed. How reliable should a test have to be, when eyewitnesses are notoriously fallible? Does a person have a right to privacy over their own memories, or should society's interest in holding criminals accountable come first?"

5th

[DoofusOfDeath]

Does a person have a right to privacy over their own memories

In the U.S. I would say yes, because we have the 5th Amendment to the Constitution. In Indian law, I have no idea.

At first blush this sounds like a high-tech form of seeing if the witch can float.

Did anyone else ...

[DikSeaCup]

Did anyone else read that headline and think, "She scanned his brain and it killed him?"

Interesting

[thermian]

So, a male centric and predominantly misogynistic country used this new and entirely untested technique to find a woman guilty of murder.

Gosh, what a surprise.

We are talking about a country where women regularly get murdered by the men in their own family, and no-one is punished, after all.

Re:5th

[Nuclear Elephant]

Just to play devil's advocate, the courts could argue here in the US that brain scans are evidentiary, and not testimony (hence witness against one's self). My guess is they would argue that brain scans are of the same family of evidence as DNA; e.g. it doesn't "testify against you", but is rather physically relevant to the case. I would hope that this would cause outrage, but judging by the number of other things the government has desensitized us to, it wouldn't surprise me.

Re:Did anyone else ...

[oodaloop]

Seconded. I think perhaps the title could have been better worded. Like, "Brain Scan Used in Murder Conviction of Indian Woman".

Three things.

[apathy maybe]

Would a man have been convicted in this case? Or is this just another example of the crap that women still face in most societies around the world?

This machine has not been peer reviewed, and yet a judge trusts it? Sounds like the judge should be removed from their position. And all convictions related to this judge that might be plausibly shown to have been influenced by this judge's ignorance, should be thrown out.
I hope this women is able to appeal.

As to privacy related to memories. Well, I would suggest that this machine isn't capable of reading a person's memories at all. However, I do think that this should be voluntary only. After all, there are many memories not related to the alleged crime that would have to be "read". Not only that (at least in the USA), all information "found" not related to the "crime" should not be able to be used by law enforcement.

I'm sure you could make a Fifth Amendment type argument here (if you are in the USA).

Minorty Report

[JackassJedi]

If this would take a bad road then in another 10 years we'll be remote-scanned when we walk around outside (or even at home) and convicted when we have only intentions of committing a crime (which is already true in some countries just sans the remote-brain-scan part). Sounds like Precrime to me.

Re:Interesting

[ebonum]

So another arrogant American who has never lived in India and is completely snug in his own perfection looks down on India as a bunch or backwards animals.

Gosh, what a surprise.

Just my two cents...

[John Pfeiffer]

Does a person have a right to privacy over their own memories, or should society's interest in holding criminals accountable come first?

I honestly think that if someone commits a crime like murder they should be held accountable, period. BUT, there's no way this brain scan thing works. I mean, REALLY. Ask the question again when the thing isn't a bunch of BS.

Also...
 
...the headline made me think she fried someone's brain with an MRI or something. Might want to see to that. :P

Nigma or Herbert?

[snspdaarf]

Ok, so is this guy Edward Nigma, or one of Frank Herbert's characters from Ix? I expect to see this kind of story at the grocery store, next to the reports of aliens eating someone's dog, and sightings of BatBoy.

Re:Brain Scanners

[gardyloo]

Ouch. You know it's from an old(ish) movie when they get the population of the earth too low by over two billion people.

How reliable?

[DaveV1.0]

How reliable should a test have to be, when eyewitnesses are notoriously fallible?

"Scientifically rigous" reliable if that test is to be taken over eyewitness testimony. And, that is what actually happens. If a witness looks at a defendant says "That guy did it." and a fingerprint examiner says "No, he didn't" and a DNA expert says "No, he didn't", the defendant is not going to trial. Evidence and test results are hard facts and is acknowledged as being more reliable than witness testimony. The tests must be scientifically rigorous or they are only as good as the memory of eyewitnesses.

Re:Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

We are talking about a country where women regularly get murdered by the men in their own family, and no-one is punished, after all.

They are merely "differently cultured".

You are obviously anti-multiculturalist.

Yeah, that's sarcasm. Sometimes, now-a-days it's hard to tell.

Re:5th

[elrous0]

If psychics are so real, how come none have come forward to debunk James Randi (the way that he has debunked dozens of them)? It would seem a fairly simple task. He has even agreed to meet psychics on "neutral ground," but still no takers.

Re:5th

[dword]

I guess it is a grey area (no pun intended!), but really we shouldn't even need to have that conversation.

But we are having this conversation because someone was convicted in a trial where one piece of evidence was a brain scan.

Guaranteed accurate

[DoofusOfDeath]

This device is guaranteed to only give what you judge to be true positives... if you only use it on people you've already decided are guilty.

The developed world has similar attitudes

[Brian Ribbon]

" Man sexually attracted to children, court told [abc.net.au] "

"A Canberra court has heard an O'Connor man who has been charged with downloading child pornography from the internet finds young children sexually attractive."

So he must have done it! Police never try to set up unpopular members of society.

Presumably he'll get a longer sentence as a result of admitting that he's attracted to children.

Re:They think...

[TheSpoom]

What's mental is that a jury (or worse, a judge) accepted the result of a new, questionable, unproven technology as proof beyond a reasonable doubt that the suspect was guilty. (I assume here that the Indian justice system has the same burden of proof as most others.)

What's mental is that this will probably set precedent.

What's mental is that this may be used from now on without question even when we did the same thing with polygraphs, only to realize later that they are notoriously inaccurate.

What. The. Fuck.

It Will Never Work

[DynaSoar]

Eyewitness testimony is fallible for the same reason one's own memory for personal events is fallible: everything we 'remember' is constructed from what is stored and seems related, producing the fastest good enough result. The same research supports both. False memory and memory rejection can happen because memory is never entirely accurate. One can even be fooled into "remembering" something someone else supposedly saw but never occurred, convolving both eyewitness report and personal memory. The foremost researchers in this field are often called to testify in court cases where false and lost memory are involved.

As such, if this judge had any sense, he'd throw the supposed researcher in jail and recuse himself after throwing out the verdict. There's no way a "brain scan" can tell how accurate a "memory" is unless it can compare what it's measuring with the perception and cognition during the actual event. And if it could do that, the operator would be there to witness the same event.

The researcher should at very least be investigated for scientific fraud. The same people that would have thrown his work(?) out under peer review would testify against him.

Getting off lightly...

[WoollyMittens]

If someone calls you a witch there, you get lynched... I'd say a brain-scan is at least a step in the right direction.

Re:Interesting

[joe slacker]

I'll neither deny the existence of misogyny nor condone the usage of techniques like this in convicting some one with a crime, but to brand the entire judicial system of institutionalized bias based on the actions of one overzealous judge is wide of the mark and reeks of judgmental behaviour. This will not stand up in the high court or the supreme court. There have been instances where high court judges have rebuked the lower court judges for overzealous behaviour like this. The Indian legal system might be slow and often ineffective but that's largely due to incompetence of the police rather than the judiciary. To compare Indian judicial system to kangaroo courts is very very wide of the mark.

Re:They think...

[j00r0m4nc3r]

India's legal system might not have the same standards that the US system has. You can't really base judgment on India's system using the US standards as a measure, especially considering the number of innocent people who are sent to jail in the US.

Re:5th

[Minwee]

Let's say that you really could tell the future. Wouldn't there be an easier way to get a couple million dollars [nylottery.org]?

Re:They think...

[Comboman]

A difference that is increasingly lost on juries (remember the O.J. trial).

Re:Interesting

[c6gunner]

So another arrogant American who has never lived in India and is completely snug in his own perfection looks down on India as a bunch or backwards animals.

How you haven't gotten modded "flamebait" yet is beyond me. In your world I guess it's ok to be bigoted towards Americans, but not ok to point out the human rights abuses which regularly occur in other nations. You're a real special kinda guy, aintcha?

Maybe you're happy turning a blind eye on honour killings, oppression of women, and class discrimination, but the rest of us generally frown on it. If you want to be in an environment where people only pick on the US while justifying any atrocities which occur elsewhere, I think the "democratic underground" forums might be more your cup of tea.

Re:The developed world has similar attitudes

[Thaelon]

Your post, and even the link you provided are missing something extremely important. A definition of "children". If you definition of children includes sexually mature humans in their late teens, but still children by some legal definition then it's really a rather misleading statistic, don't you think? There's a reason they're called jailbait. They're physically mature enough to be sexually attractive to other members of the species for no other reason than the basic human desire to procreate that we all share, but legally, and perhaps morally off limits.

Re:5th

[HungryHobo]

tests aren't hard.

"I can lift things with my mind!"
"Then just stand behind this barrier and lift that pile of peas over there one at a time into the cup over there."
"Ummmm.... it isn't working because the spirits don't like to be tested!"

"I can see the future"
"Right, go sit in the box, tommorrow the computer is going to show you a random symbol, draw it for us"
"But but but... no fair!"

Re:They think...

[Free the Cowards]

Indeed. It's unfortunate that Simpson almost certainly got away with murder. But the fact of the matter is that the LAPD was a bunch of incompetent bumbling fools in the matter, and hateful fools at that. Their attempts to frame a (probably) guilty man ended up setting him free. The jury's decision was correct in this case.

Re:I see Phrenology

[the_skywise]

No it's not... It's sarcasm.

But this IS the same in the general sense that pseudo-science is being used to perform predictions about personality traits. Sure, EVENTUALLY, we may be able to determine if a person is lying through a brain scan. But not now and certainly not because eletrical activity in brain quadrant 27-a is more active than in 14-b. That's about the same as saying that because you have a bump in the upper right forehead you're more prone to lying...

(although I was going more for "funny" mods than "informative"...)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrenology#Methodology [wikipedia.org]

Phrenology was a complex process that involved feeling the bumps in the skull to determine an individual's psychological attributes. Franz Joseph Gall first believed that the brain was made up of 27 individual 'organs' that created one's personality, with the first 19 of these 'organs' believed to exist in other animal species. Phrenologists would run their fingertips and palms over the skulls of their patients to feel for enlargements or indentations. The phrenologist would usually take measurements of the overall head size using a caliper. With this information, the phrenologist would assess the character and temperament of the patient and address each of the 27 "brain organs". This type of analysis was used to predict the kinds of relationships and behaviors to which the patient was prone. In its heyday during the 1820s-1840s, phrenology was often used to predict a child's future life, to assess prospective marriage partners and to provide background checks for job applicants.

Re:The developed world has similar attitudes

[Anonymous Coward]

And of course the people who do not know it include the media, people in general, prosecutors and police.

Memories inaccurate, scans too & forced testim

[Anonymous Coward]

Memories are notoriously inaccurate. It is a known fact that even memories of events with a big impact, the kind of events that are memorised best, usually bear only a passing resemblance to the actual event. Most of what a memory is is actually reconstructed, that is to say, you kind of start with a few kernels of truth and then fill in the gaps. And memories get distorted over time. They can easily change, be implanted, or fuse with memories with one or more shared givens. This is why eyewitness testimony is not usually allowed in court anymore where I live; a former rector of my university did a great deal to investigate reliability of eyewitnesses and to raise our consciousness to what he was shocked to find.

Then there is the technology of brain scanning, which is only in its infancy. So it isn't even feasable to scan what a person thinks he remembers, let alone judge whether that's accurate. Brain scans can only measure things like energy consumption, signal strength and bloodflow at the moment. Decoding actual memories and thoughts is still beyond our technological capabilities. You can maybe (maybe!) detect if someone recognises a photograph with some kind of accuracy, but you certainly can't determine if someone killed someone, let alone who. The fact that the technology hasn't been peer reviewed yet should raise a big red flag, people.

And then there is the ethical angle. Where I live this would be called forced testimony, which is illegal. To put it in a form that most of you will recognise: it would take away people's right to remain silent. Essentially, testimony extracted with a brain scan is similar to testimony extracted with torture and should be (and is, where I live) just as illegal.

Re:The developed world has similar attitudes

[Criton]

The anti pedophile crusade is nothing more then a smoke screen for something truly evil inside the government. Also the truth is these people who do these crusades almost always are criminally sick people themselves and are only doing them to distract the public from seeing there flaws and short comings. It's best to never buy into these so called crusades just read a history book every time there always was an ulterior motive. Hitler did the exact some stuff to gain power in pre WWII Germany. I never bought into it and knew it was bullshit from day one same with the so called war on terror and the war on drugs. It's all the same BS BTW I don't care what people think as far as pedos go it actions that matter. They should only concentrate on those who commit crimes against children going after lolicons and other harmless individuals will only force the real predators into hiding making them that much harder to catch. Plus prison time often will turn normally harmless individuals into very dangerous people because the prison system is so broken one has no choice but to become an animal to survive. BTW many of the people behind these type of things often are the real deal.