Essentially everyone working with a model of mitigated free will accepts that if there is enough brain damage, responsibility for a criminal act goes out the window. Even Stephen Morse of the University of Pennsylvania, a strident critic of neuroscience in the courtroom (much more later), concedes, “Suppose we could show that the higher deliberative centers in the brain seem to be disabled in these cases. If these are people who cannot control episodes of gross irrationality, we’ve learned something that might be relevant to the legal ascription of responsibility.”13 In this view, mitigating
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