Case Analysis

Every week, Mind on Trial examines cases through three lenses: the forensic evidence, the neuroscience, and the legal outcome. But before we tell you what the law decided, we want to know what you would decide. Read the facts below. No outcome. No verdict. Just the case. Then tell us in the comments: what would you decide? The facts On March 30, 1981, a 25-year-old man named John Hinckley Jr. walked up to the Washington Hilton Hotel in Washington D.C. and fired six shots at P

In 1957, a man named Lawrence Robinson was stopped by Los Angeles police officers who observed needle marks on his arm. He was not caught using drugs. He was not in possession of drugs. He was arrested for being a drug addict, which was a criminal offense under California law at the time. He was convicted and sentenced to ninety days in jail. Five years later, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that convicting a person simply for the status of being addicted to drug

In 2005, a neuroscientist named James Fallon was studying brain scans of convicted serial killers when he noticed something unusual about one of the scans in his dataset. The pattern of activity was consistent with the others he had been analyzing: reduced function in the orbital cortex and other regions associated with empathy, moral reasoning, and impulse control. The kind of scan, in his own words, that he associated with psychopathy. The scan belonged to him. Fallon had i

In the spring of 1989, a woman was brutally attacked while jogging in Central Park. Within days, five teenagers had been arrested. Within weeks, four of them had confessed on video. The confessions were detailed. They were emotional. They were played for the jury. They were also entirely false. The Central Park Five, as they came to be known, spent between six and thirteen years in prison before DNA evidence identified the actual perpetrator, a convicted rapist named Matias R

In 1848, a railroad foreman named Phineas Gage survived an accident that should have killed him. An iron rod was driven through the front of his skull at high speed, passing completely through his brain and landing several feet away. He was conscious within minutes. He walked to the doctor himself. Gage recovered physically. He lived for another twelve years. But the people who knew him said he was never the same person again. Before the accident, he had been described as eff

Imagine a room approximately the size of a parking space. You are in it for twenty-two to twenty-four hours a day. There is a slot in the door for food. There is no meaningful human contact. There is nothing to do. This continues not for a day, not for a week, but for months or years at a time. This is solitary confinement. It is currently used in prisons and jails across the United States, and on any given day, an estimated eighty thousand people are being held in some form

On the morning of March 30, 1981, John Hinckley Jr. shot President Ronald Reagan outside a Washington hotel. Reagan survived. Hinckley was arrested at the scene. Two years later, a jury found him not guilty by reason of insanity. The public was outraged. Congress changed the law within months. Several states abolished the insanity defense entirely. What almost no one stopped to ask was whether the jury got it right. That question sits at the center of one of the oldest and mo

In 1984, a woman named Jennifer Thompson was raped in her apartment in North Carolina. During the attack, she made a decision. She studied her attacker's face with as much focus as she could manage, memorizing every detail, because she was determined to identify him if she survived. She did survive. She picked Ronald Cotton out of a photo lineup. She identified him again in a live lineup. She testified against him at trial with total certainty. She told the jury she was one h

In 2013, a man named Eric Loomis stood before a judge in Wisconsin and was sentenced to six years in prison. The judge cited many factors. One of them was a score — a number generated by a computer program called COMPAS, which had assessed Loomis as high risk for reoffending. Loomis had never seen the algorithm. He had no way to challenge it. He did not know what questions it asked, how it weighed the answers, or why it reached the conclusion it did. The company that built it

What does the law do with a brain that isn’t finished growing? This isn’t a hypothetical question. If the part of the brain that’s responsible for decision-making, impulse control, and understanding long-term consequences isn’t fully developed and still under active construction–biologically, measurably, verifiably–does that change how we assign blame? Does it change what a just punishment would be? For most of American legal history, the answer was no. A crime was a crime. I