Agency, mental illness, and criminal responsibility: neuroscience and insanity

Criminal responsibility practices have come under attack by a field of legal scholarship, known as neuro-jurisprudence, which seeks to apply modern neuroscience to the age-old question of insanity. Powered by brain imaging and rigorous experimental methods, neuroscientific studies have called for the elimination of criminal responsibility because it presumes a free will that has no causal explanation for human behaviour. We argue that criminal responsibility presumes not free will but rational agency, which neuroscience suggests can be linked to a network of brain regions traversing frontal and parietal sites that mediate distinct computations of ‘intentional action’ and ‘action awareness’, respectively. Serious mental illness, an essential but not sufficient clinical condition to negate criminal responsibility, can compromise these frontal-parietal interactions, leading to specific disturbances in neural computations undergirding agency. Thus, we conclude that modern neuroscience represents a distinct but complementary theoretical and empirical framework that can potentially aid insanity jurisprudence.