Brain Defense: Murder in Manhattan and the Dawn of Neuroscience in America's Courtrooms, The by Davis Kevin

Author:Davis, Kevin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Press
Published: 2017-02-07T16:29:54+00:00

CHAPTER 13

What’s a Picture Worth?

On October 8, 1992, Judge Richard Carruthers signed and released his decision on the Frye hearing and had his office send copies to prosecutor Zachary Weiss and to defense attorney Diarmuid White. It looked good for Weinstein.

Carruthers decided to allow Weinstein’s PET scans and readings to be admitted as evidence. He sided with White that these diagnostic procedures had been generally accepted by the scientific community. But there was a catch. He would not allow experts to testify that the readings could explain or account for specific behavior. In other words, jurors would see the colorful pictures of Weinstein’s brain with the big black hole, but they couldn’t hear testimony that his arachnoid cyst, or the reduced glucose metabolism in his frontal lobe, had caused him to kill his wife. Such extrapolation was beyond what was generally accepted as valid in the fields of psychiatry, psychology, and neurology. The judge further said that the notion that an arachnoid cyst or reduced glucose metabolism could directly cause violence was not an accepted theory, nor was the idea that impairments of the brain directly caused violence. Thus, these arguments could not be introduced at trial.

As for Antonio Damasio’s somatic marker theory, Carruthers wrote that as interesting as it sounded, it was not yet generally accepted in the scientific community and had no place in the trial. He acknowledged that cognitive problems might render a person unable to choose a proper behavioral response in moments of stress, but he was unconvinced that experts accepted the theory that aberrant behavior could be the product of a person’s history of reward and punishment responses, which were supposedly encoded in the autonomic nervous system. “Rather, Doctor Damasio appears to have first proposed this theory in his research report as a ‘possible’ explanation of the phenomena that his team observed during reported SCR studies,” Carruthers wrote.

Prosecutor Weiss had successfully shot down the possibility that experts could testify that Weinstein’s brain damage caused him to be violent, but he still had serious concerns about the jury seeing the dramatic PET images. The last thing he wanted was for Weinstein’s lawyer to flash them in front of an impressionable jury in the absence of a more sophisticated discussion about what they meant. He wondered if a jury was capable of seeing beyond them and following the more important testimony and evidence that Weinstein was not insane—not even temporarily insane—but simply had gotten angry and killed his wife.

Weiss felt strongly that Weinstein had to be held responsible for his crime. He might indeed have lost control of himself during the fight with his wife and strangled her, making it a crime of passion and perhaps a case of manslaughter. Weiss saw those kinds of cases all the time. The law took into account whether a murder was premeditated or not.

But something else was gnawing at Weiss. The medical examiner suggested the possibility that Barbara Weinstein had not died after her husband squeezed her throat but had been unconscious.

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