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Lawyer to Try to Enter Lie-Detection Brain Scan as Courtroom Evidence

by Amar Toor on May 6, 2010 at 03:18 PM

This week, an attorney from Brooklyn will attempt to make U.S. legal history by using a lie-detection brain scan to prove that an important witness is telling the truth. Attorney David Levin is currently representing Cynette Wilson, who claims that her temp agency employer, CoreStaff Services, gave her less desirable assignments after she complained about sexual harassment at her job site. Another employee at CoreStaff has gone on record as saying that he heard the woman's supervisor saying explicitly that Wilson should not be placed on assignments because of her complaint. The supervisor in question has denied ever saying such a thing, leaving the case in a detente of he-said-she-said debate.

Levin took the coworker into a lab to undergo an fMRI brain scan from Cephalos, a company that claims to deliver "independent, scientific validation that someone is telling the truth." As Wired explains, some studies have shown that when a patient lies, the brain sends a surge of blood to the prefrontal cortex, which an fMRI scan can display visually. Although some studies have claimed to pick up lying in patients with accuracy rates up to 90-percent, many others aren't convinced that those results could necessarily hold water outside of a laboratory setting. As NYU neuroscientist Elizabeth Phelps says, "There is just no reason to think that this is going to be a good measure of whether someone is telling the truth."

But Ed Cheng, a Brooklyn Law School professor and potential consultant to Ms. Wilson, thinks it's high time that machines start taking over in an area where humans are known to be flawed. While he acknowledges that "the validation studies may have some problems," Cheng insists that, if fMRI scans "can help the jury make this decision even a little bit better, it's hard to defend keeping this stuff out." If the scans want to make it into the New York court, they'll have to pass the Frye standard, which stipulates that scientific evidence must be "generally accepted as reliable in the relevant scientific community." Given the protest from Phelps and her peers, that may prove to be a difficult task for Levin. But, if the evidence is allowed in Cynette's case, it could very well set a new legal norm, and vastly alter the courtroom landscape. [From: Wired]

Tags: brain, courtroom, courtrooms, employment, evidence, FmriScans, law, lawsuit, LieDetector, neurology, neuroscience, SexualHarassment, top

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