Search Results

This chapter presents eight cases to frame and discuss the question of how neuroscience, in the form of neuroimaging, can inform evaluations of people's actions in the criminal law realm. The discussion supports the view that neuroscience can inform but not determine judgments of criminal responsibility. The cases presented suggest that brain imaging may be more useful in assessing judgments of criminal negligence, less useful in cases of impulsive behaviour and psychopathy, and least useful in judgments of criminal intent. It cautions against falling prey to a so-called ‘brain overclaim syndrome’.

This chapter amplifies the concept of a criminal offense by examining the concept of criminal culpability and the proposition that a guilty mind or mens rea is also a necessary element of every criminal offense. Although mens rea is a central concept of the criminal law, it is an ambiguous one. This chapter explains that ambiguity historically. It shows that over the course of two centuries a utilitarian reform movement developed and promoted the idea that every offense should have a statutorily defined mental element. Prior to that time, culpability figured primarily as an excuse. This chapter also discusses the related concept of strict liability, or liability without culpability.

This chapter discusses how neuroscience, in the form of neuroimaging, can inform but not determine whether an individual has the requisite mental capacity to be responsible for criminal behavior. Brain dysfunction can be a matter of degree, and this may influence judgments of responsibility, mitigation, and excuse in the criminal law. In analyzing these judgments, the chapter distinguishes among lacking mental capacity, having partial capacity, and having full capacity but failing to exercise it. Behavioral criteria are necessary in addition to data from brain imaging to establish criminal responsibility.

In achieving a guilty finding in the Hong Kong legal system, both criminal intent or Mens Rea and the criminal act itself or Actus Reus have to be proven. It is important to note that the age considered to be mature enough to foster criminal intent, however, differs from country to country because of variations in social environment and culture. Today, the minimum age of criminal responsibility has shifted from seven to 10 as a result of recommendations made by the Bar Association of Hong Kong and the United Nations Committee on Children's Rights. As heated debates were stirred because of this issue, A Bill Committee on the Juvenile Offenders Bill 2001 was formulated in July 2002 so that the issue could be given further examination. After the final legislation was passed, the ordinance became law in July 2003.

This chapter examines the motives behind criminal intents and identifies potential mitigation themes for persons involved in gang activities, with a specific focus on prison gang crimes. It considers the moral significance of crimes that have institutional forms of support and argues that these socially caused crimes are less blameworthy than other types of crimes that are socially caused. It also identifies elements in motivations for crimes that are connected to contexts in which the non-use of aggressive responses poses significant forms of loss and threat to individuals living in environments that are governed by either the code of the streets or the code of the prison. The chapter concludes with a review of the social-functionalist framework that offers some promising guidance for understanding the potential responses of jurors to aggravated crimes of murder.

An intrinsic and material consequence of mass violence is the corresponding mass production of human corpses. What the perpetrators subsequently do with these corpses varies greatly from one instance to another, and the rationale behind their choice and behaviour is not always clear. If establishing an infallible typology of the treatment of corpses of the victims by the perpetrators thus holds the risk of leading to erroneous extrapolations, the different modalities of treatment all seem to share one point: the use by the perpetrators of the corpses of their victims to make their crimes visible or, to the contrary, to hide them. Focusing on selected cases (Bosnia-Herzegovina, Rwanda, Argentina), this contribution explores how treatments of corpses as diverse as exhibition, mutilation, concealment, or destruction are seldom a random choice and reveal the perverse relationship between perpetrators, violence, and death; between what they show and what they hide.