Much blogable ado has been made about the New York Times article ‘The Brain on the Stand‘ by Jeffrey Rosen (and I would say quite rightly so). While the article shows nuance in the opinions of brain imagers, and as much as I would fully recommend you read the entire article, Rosen really does sum things up quite nicely:

As the new technologies proliferate, even the neurolaw experts themselves have only begun to think about the questions that lie ahead. Can the police get a search warrant for someone’s brain? Should the Fourth Amendment protect our minds in the same way that it protects our houses? Can courts order tests of suspects’ memories to determine whether they are gang members or police informers, or would this violate the Fifth Amendment’s ban on compulsory self-incrimination? Would punishing people for their thoughts rather than for their actions violate the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment? However astonishing our machines may become, they cannot tell us how to answer these perplexing questions. We must instead look to our own powers of reasoning and intuition, relatively primitive as they may be.

As Stephen Morse puts it, neuroscience itself can never identify the mysterious point at which people should be excused from responsibility for their actions because they are not able, in some sense, to control themselves. That question, he suggests, is “moral and ultimately legal,” and it must be answered not in laboratories but in courtrooms and legislatures. In other words, we must answer it ourselves.

Another interesting thing: the article mentions the Center for Cognitive Liberty and Ethics. It’s worth a gander for some interesting reports and outlines some spooky issues ranging from brain ‘fingerprinting’ to psychotropic weapons.