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Neuroscience And Mental Competency: Current Uses And Future Potential, John B. Meixner Jr.

Scholarly Works

One major conundrum in the field of law and neuroscience is that the mental states that are most relevant to legal determinations are often mental states that occurred in the past, and can longer be assessed. Could the defendant, at the time he committed the crime, have had the cognitive capacity to satisfy the required mens rea for the crime charged? Was an individual's tortious conduct intentional or inadvertent? Even if the field of neuroscience eventually gains the ability to provide data relevant to understanding of immediate mental states, those data will be unavailable to legal actors by the time …