The Brain on the Stand - American legal system

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The Brain on the Stand

 

JEFFREY ROSEN

http://www.heraldtribune.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070311/ZNYT04/703110312

 

 

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I. Mr. Weinsteins Cyst When historians of the future try to identify the moment that neuroscience began to transform the American legal system, they may point to a little-noticed case from the early 1990s. The case involved Herbert Weinstein, a 65-year-old ad executive who was charged with strangling his wife, Barbara, to death and then, in an effort to make the murder look like a suicide, throwing her body out the window of their 12th-floor apartment on East 72nd Street in Manhattan. Before the trial began, Weinsteins lawyer suggested that his client should not be held responsible for his actions because of a mental defect namely, an abnormal cyst nestled in his arachnoid membrane, which surrounds the brain like a spider web.