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ABSTRACT
Most of the public agrees that society is safer without psychopaths. However, a new sentencing strategy for psychopaths facing the death penalty has erupted from both mental health researchers and defense lawyers-imploring juries to view a defendant's psychopathy as a consideration of sentencing mitigation, and, consequently, urging juries to impose life imprisonment instead of the death penalty.
This article explains the frightening nature of psychopaths, how neuroscience and neuroimaging intersects with the study of psychopathy, and, specifically, whether an fMRI brain scan is appropriate mitigating evidence in death penalty sentencing hearings when the convicted defendant is a diagnosed psychopath.
I. INTRODUCTION
[The psychopath] is unfamiliar with the primary facts or data of what might be called personal values and is altogether incapable of understanding such matters. It is impossible for him to take even a slight interest in the tragedy or joy or the striving of humanity as presented in serious literature or art. He is also indifferent to all these matters in life itself. Beauty and ugliness, except in a very superficial sense, goodness, evil, love, horror, and humor have no actual meaning, no power to move him.
He is, furthermore, lacking in the ability to see that others are moved. It is as though he were color-blind, despite his sharp intelligence, to this aspect of human existence. It cannot be explained to him because there is nothing in his orbit of awareness that can bridge the gap with comparison. He can repeat the words and say glibly that he understands, and there is no way for him to realize that he does not understand.1
Society has an intense fascination with psychopaths. The stories of Kenneth Bianchi,2 Ted Bundy,3 John Wayne Gacy,4 and others have spawned books and movies, and caused equal parts public outrage and peculiar interest. For many years, society's disdain for psychopaths and their crimes left many people convinced that the proper punishment for them was death. This attitude stretches across time and cultures. For example, "the Yupic-speaking Eskimos in northwest Alaska" have a traditional punishment for the Eskimo they label a "kunlangeta."5 Kunlangeta refers to:
[A] man who . . . repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting and, when the other...