Light sentence for ‘bad’ genes
An Italian court has cut the sentence given to a convicted murderer by a year because he has genes linked to violent behaviour. Is the decision based on sound science and what are the implications of this precedent when we really do understand how our genome influences behaviour?
Nature News reports that an Italian court has cut the sentence given to a convicted murderer by a year because genetic testing revealed he has genes linked to violent behaviour.
This is the first time that behavioural genetics has affected a sentence passed by a European court.
I am no lawyer, but I gather this form of genetic determinism sets a scary precedent, in Europe at least, and no doubt gives lawyers elsewhere ammunition to boost their client’s case. Scary, for many reasons, but mostly for the scientific one, which is that we simply don’t yet have the genetic knowledge to definitively say, your genes made you do it.
Criminal genes
The convicted dude (Abdelmalek Bayout) in question was found to have abnormalities in brain-imaging scans and in five genes that have been linked to violent behaviour, including the gene called MAOA (or metabolizing enzyme monoamine oxidase).
The psychological report given to the court concluded that Bayout’s genes would make him more prone to behaving violently if provoked. On this evidence, the judge knocked and extra year off the Bayout’s nine year sentence.
Knowledge deficit
Our problem, as pointed out in the Nature article, is that that these genes may well have an influence on our behaviour, but it is a generalised influence only. That is, on a population-wide survey you may find people with these specific genes are more likely to display violent behaviour, but there are too many unknown environmental and epigenetic factors that also affect the activity of these genes. Nor do we understand the affect of possible other protective genes on the activity of these ‘violent’ genes. So our ability to predict how these genes will work in an individual is vague, at best.
Pass the can opener
Up to now, efforts to use a one’s genetics as a defense in court have been unsuccessful although the Nature report says a few cases have influenced sentencing in the United States.
Hopefully sanity and sound science will prevail for now. What will even more intriguing, however, will be the legal implications when we actually do have a more profound understanding of the human genome and its influence on human behaviours. It would be nice to think I could explain away all my loutish, know-it-all and foolhardy behaviour during my teenage years as simply genetic.
On an only marginally more futuristic note, in workshops I conduct for secondary students and community groups on this topic, I have had serious suggestions from people that if we know the genes associated with criminal behaviour, could we not select against them or engineer them in some way to render them benign, thus making society safer? Technically we could, and could so do with technology existing today, though it is generally illegal. And here we open another can of worms.
The exponential pace at which this science is moving suggests the day we need to deal with all these issues won’t be too far away. In fact society should be debating the applications of these technologies now.
Scientific American has reprinted the Nature story, but there are a few interesting comments at the bottom:
Jason Major
This is a note from the two court experts (Pietro Pietrini, molecular neuroscientisit from the University of Pisa and Giuseppe Sartori, Cognitive Neuroscientist from the University of Padova) involved in the Bayout case in Italy.
(see Nature news: ttp://www.nature.com/news/2009/091030/full/news.2009.1050.html)
No es mi culpa: son mis genes
Bad genes get a ligther sentence
Strafmilderung wegen “schlechter Gene”
The “DNA Pardon”: Murder sentence genetically reduced
Un juge italien découvre le gène du meutre
These titles, used to summarise a decision from an Italian Criminal Court on a case of “diminuished capacity” due to psychiatric problems, are ill-posed and do not represent the core issue of this forensic case. Nowhere in our report or in the judge decision it is claimed a causal link between genes and criminal behaviour.
Dimisnuished responsibility was proved by a casual link (required by Italian criminal law) between a pathological mental state and and the criminal behaviour. The crime (homicide) resulted to be a symptom of the undelying psychiatric disorder. The defendant had a reduced capacity to “do otherwise” due to his mental illness.
Given that psychiatric symptoms may be easily faked as they are mostly based on the defendant’s verbal report, the objectivisation of the “disease of the mind” is therefore critical.
Evidence that the psychiatric phenomenology causally linked to the crime has a “hard” neural basis was investigated using neuropsychological assessment, MRI and fMRI (using the stop-signal as activation task) and molecular genetics. Cognitive and molecular neurosciences aìwere not used to causally explain the crime but to insturmentally prove the “hard” correlates of themental illness wichi symtpoms are acusally linked to the crime.
We have found that the psychosis was also accompanied by other severe cognitive disorders, by a dysfunctional frontal lobe and a sfavorable genetics. We have assessed the defendant, previously evaluated only with a psychiatric interview, also with a full neuropsychological, imaging (morphological and functional) and genetic evaluation. The psychiatric interview may be may be easily faked by the defendant and it has a unsatisfacory inter-rated concordance. Neuroscience methods may, therefore, be used to better picture the “disease of mind” but can say nothing, contrary to what seems attributed to us, about the direct proximal causal link with the crime.The symptoms which, by incontrovertible evidence, are linked to the crime are a fully blown untreated psychotic state characterised by delusions of persecuzione, lowIQ, a very poor “theory of mind”, and control of impulse. THESE ARE THE DIRECT CAUSES OF THE CRIME NOT THE BRAIN OR THE GENETIC.
In order to better characterise the required “disease of the mind” there is the legal requirement to show that the disease has a biological basis.Altered brain functioning in controlling behaviour and genetics are the required biological markers of the “disease of the mind”. The only methods that can respond to this requirements are the methods of neuroscience that we have applied. THE CRITICAL ISSUE IS WHETHER THERE ARE BETTER TECHNIQUES, TO ADDRESS THIS ISSUES OTHER THAN THE ONE USED BY US? WE BELIEVE THE RESPONSE IS NO.