Do Biometrics Belong in the Courtroom?
A few of you may have your eye on a civil trial set to take place next month in Brooklyn, New York. An article published a few days ago at Wired.com details the dispute in which a Brooklyn attorney hopes to offer a brain scan as evidence that a key witness is telling the truth. If admitted, it would be a first for the United States and carry incredible precedent for the future of neuroscience in a court of law.
It’s pretty odd stuff, really, but when you consider how far we’ve come in biometrics in recent years, it’s not surprising when these topics bubble to the top.
The dispute centers around an employer-retaliation case where Cynette Wilson, a woman working at a temp agency, made a complaint about sexual harassment on a job site. Another employee at the agency apparently heard Wilson’s supervisor say that she should not be placed on future jobs because of the complaint. The supervisor, of course, denies that he said anything to that extent.
Wilson’s lawyer had an fMRI brain scan conducted on the coworker by a company called Cephos, which claims to provide “independent, scientific validation that someone is telling the truth.” Cephos boasts this ability based on lab studies that use fMRI scans to measure levels of blood-oxygen in the brain. Studies suggest that when someone lies, the brain sends more blood to the ventrolateral area of the prefrontal cortex, a trend that would show up in the brain scans. According to the article, researchers using this technique have identified lying in study subjects with 76-90% accuracy.
This is pretty interesting news, and it certainly raises some serious ethical questions that should probably be dealt with before technology like this is allowed into the court system as fair evidence.
Of course, this is not a criminal case and no one’s life is explicitly on the line, but it seems that accuracy of only 76% might not be there quite yet, at least to qualify a brain scan as hard evidence. In addition, those involved who are arguing against the fMRI scan call attention to the fact that the brain scan was done four years after the witness allegedly heard the original remarks.
As for whether the brain scans meet a scientific standard for evidence for New York, as based on the Frye standard, has yet to be determined. The Frye Standard is a general acceptance test to determine the admissibility of scientific evidence based on its acceptance within the scientific community. Proponents of using neuroscience in court feel it might be helpful in a supplementary way, aiding a jury in reaching a final decision perhaps with a little more ease.
Still, isn’t that the point of having a jury in the first place – to provide a sort of discussion on evidence and guilt? Should we really be looking to make their job “easier?” Perhaps deliberation should be rigorous and involved at the very least when dealing with the justice system and someone’s place in it.
It’s an interesting debate, nonetheless, especially from a technological and ethical standpoint. In fact, neuroscience has been permitted in trials in the past, albeit in sentencing. An individual’s brain scan has never before been permitted as evidence to tell if someone is telling the truth.
Expect to hear a lot more of these conversations, as biometric technologies become more a part of our everyday life. My guess is that it won’t be long before we see similar arguments centered around eye tracking, if they haven’t already.
Lie-Detection Brain Scan Could Be Used in Court for First Time
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