The real function of prison is to remove those persons from society who are a threat to it until such time as they are no threat. However what we do instead is to meter out punishment in sufficient quantity that we deter the victim or his family from revenge – a different policy.

This does suggest that jurors will want to see evil punished, and that you should encourage them to think about the actual evidence instead of just reacting to the crime. But you knew that.

Science is only just beginning to fill the gap between neurology and observable behavior. I think you’ll be way ahead of the neuroscientists for a long time.

If jurors do feel, personally, wronged, it is, obviously, the collective type of harm that we want the jurors to have in mind, as those representing the collective will of the people, our peers.

I think the reason that there is an emotional factor and should be, is because we are people, not robots. So the results of the study should not be surprising. A guilty or not guilty verdict can be seen as a much more objective finding, than the one for punishment. I think that is because what is “just” is a much more subjecting concept than a guilty or not guilty verdict, based upon beyond a reasonable doubt.

I think we have all seen a not guilty verdict where some jurors have said, well, yeah, we think he’s guilty, but the state didn’t prove it beyond a reasobable doubt.

With sanctions and mitigators, aggrvators and life stories, there is, often, more subjective considerations when deciding punishments and trying to decode the reasons for them.

Many states already felt that way and that is why they passed statutes for the judges to make the final decision in death penalty cases. The thought was their experience would make them more objective and less emotional in making that decision. The reasoning may or may not have been sound, but there appears some element of truth to it, to me. However, Ring v Arizona got rid of judges making such decsions, in some states and under some circumstances.

However, with all new developments in brain study, we need to take into some other observations. These found during the juvenile death penalty debate.

UCLA’s Elizabeth Sowell, another prominent brain-development researcher, takes a dim view of the movement to apply neuroscience to the law. She says that no current research connects specific brain traits of typical teenagers to any mental or behavioral problems.

“The scientific data aren’t ready to be used by the judicial system,” she remarks. “The hardest thing [for neuroscientists to do] is to bring brain research into real-life contexts.”

The ambiguities of science don’t mix with social and political causes, contends neuroscientist Bradley S. Peterson of the Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York City.

Brain-scanning techniques, including the popular MRI, remain a “crude level of analysis,” Casey notes. What’s more, many critical brain-cell responses are too fast for MRI to track.