Bonjour"s A Priori Justification of Induction

Justifications of induction, and certainly a priori justifications\ud of induction, are out of fashion these days. In a\ud chapter of his recent book, In Defense of Pure Reason\ud (1998)1, however, Lawrence Bonjour, the respected American\ud epistemologist, bucks the trend and makes a valiant\ud attempt to revive the latter. What he claims can be justified\ud a priori is that if the premise of a standard inductive argument\ud obtains, then it is likely or probable that the conclusion\ud will hold. A standard inductive premise, for Bonjour,\ud will state that a certain proportion m/n of observed cases of\ud A have been cases of B, as well as specify that there has\ud been "suitable variation of the collateral circumstances�\ud and that the "observed proportion ... converges over time\ud to the fraction m/n� (Bonjour, 206-07). The standard\ud inductive conclusion will state that there is "a corresponding\ud objective regularity in the world� (212), in other\ud words an objective regularity of the form: m/n of all As are\ud Bs

Modern Sentencing Mitigation

Sentencing has become the most important part of a criminal case. Over the past century, criminal trials have given way almost entirely to pleas. Once a case is charged, it almost always ends up at sentencing. And notably, judges learn little sentencing-relevant information about the case or the defendant prior to sentencing and have significant discretion in sentencing decisions. Thus, sentencing is the primary opportunity for the defense to affect the outcome of the case by presenting mitigation: reasons why the nature of the offense or characteristics of the defendant warrant a lower sentence. It is surprising, then, that relatively little scholarship in criminal law focuses on mitigation at sentencing. Fundamental questions have not been explored: Do the Sentencing Guidelines—which largely limit the relevance of mitigating evidence—make mitigation unimportant? Does the extent or type of mitigation offered have any relationship with the sentence imposed? This Article fills that gap by examining a previously unexplored data set: sentencing memoranda filed by defense attorneys in federal felony cases. By systematically parsing categories of mitigating evidence and quantitatively coding the evidence, I show that mitigation is a central predictor of sentencing outcomes and that judges approach mitigation in a modern way: rather than adhering to the strict, offense-centric structure that has dominated sentencing since the advent of the Sentencing Guidelines in the 1980s, judges individualize sentences in ways that consider the personal characteristics of each defendant, beyond what the Guidelines anticipate. And particular types of mitigation, such as science-based arguments about mental and physical health, appear especially persuasive. The results have significant implications for criminal justice policy: while my data show that mitigation is critical to judges’ sentencing decisions, both the Guidelines and procedural rules minimize mitigation, failing to encourage both defense attorneys and prosecutors to investigate and consider it. I suggest reforms to make sentencing more equitable, such as requiring the investigation and presentation of mitigation to constitute effective assistance of counsel, easing the barriers to obtaining relevant information on mental and physical health mitigation, and encouraging prosecutors to consider mitigation in charging decisions and sentencing recommendations

Neuroscience and Mental Competency: Current Uses and Future Potential

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\u27s 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 someone is actually interested in gathering them. The issue of mental competency in criminal cases is an exception to this general problem. Unlike most other relevant mental states in the law, competency deals with a criminal defendant\u27s current mental state, during the litigation itself. Surprisingly, however, relatively little scholarship has been written addressing the potential for neuroscience to aid in competency evaluations. We do not have clear data as to how often neuroscience is used in competency evaluations by experts or in hearings conducted by courts. There is virtually no literature discussing how neuroscience data, at our current level of understanding, might be able to aid in determining competency. This article aims to begin to fill that gap, by exploring several ways in which neuroscience could aid in competency determinations

Countermeasure Mechanisms in a P300-Based Concealed Information Test

The detection of deception has been the focus of much research in the past 20 years. Though much controversy has surrounded one deception detection protocol, the “Control Question Test” (NRC 2003, Ben-Shakhar 2002), an alternative test, the Guilty Knowledge Test (GKT), developed by Lykken (1959, 1960), is based on scientific principles and has been well-received in the scientific community. The GKT presents subjects with various stimuli, one of which is a guilty knowledge item (termed the probe, such as the gun used to commit a crime). The other stimuli in the test consist of control items that are of the same class (termed irrelevants, such as other potentially deadly weapons: a knife, a bat, etc.) such that an innocent person would be unable to discriminate them from the guilty knowledge item. If the subject’s physiological response is greater for the guilty knowledge item, then knowledge of the crime or other event is inferred. The Guilty Knowledge Test has been adapted for use through the measurement of Event Related Potentials. Specifically, the P300 component, which is large when an individual recognizes an item as meaningful, is the primary dependent variable. We recently introduced an accurate, and countermeasure (CM)-resistant P300-based Guilty Knowledge Test (Rosenfeld et al. 2008). When subjects use CMs to all irrelevant items in the test, the probe P300 is increased rather than reduced, as in previous P300-based deception protocols, allowing detection of CM users. Evidence herein suggests this is partly due to an omit effect; the probe was the only uncountered item. 3 groups were tested: a guilty omit probe group performed an explicit response to each irrelevant item but not to the probe; an innocent omit irrelevant group saw only irrelevant items and omitted a response to one item; and a guilty no omit group had a guilty knowledge item as probe and performed an explicit response to each. We found a greater P300 amplitude to probes in the guilty omit probe condition as compared with the other two conditions, indicating a P300 enhancing effect of omitting a response to a single stimulus

An Empirical Research Agenda for the Forensic Sciences

After the National Academy of Sciences issued a stunning report in 2009 on the unscientific state of many forensic science subfields, forensic science has undergone internal and external scrutiny that it had managed to avoid for decades. Although some reform efforts are underway, forensic science writ large has yet to embrace and settle upon an empirical research agenda that addresses knowledge gaps pertaining to the reliability of its methods. Our paper addresses this problem by proposing a preliminary set of fourteen empirical studies for the forensic sciences. Following a brief discussion of the courtroom treatment of forensic science evidence, we sketch a series of studies that should be conducted to increase understanding of what forensic examiners are doing, how accurately they are doing it, and how cognitive bias may affect the work product. We also propose several studies that examine how the specific questions examiners are asked might affect the validity and persuasiveness of examiners’ responses. We conclude by affirming the importance of developing a research culture within the forensic sciences that includes a commitment to conducting, participating in, and relying upon high quality empirical research