A brain scan enters a courtroom like a map enters a disputed territory, useful and incomplete and easily mistaken for the ground itself. 

Courts already set these images beside witness accounts and forensic reports. The practice is called neurolaw, and it invites judges to weigh what the brain reveals about impulse, memory, intention and control. 

Understanding neurological injury, developmental stage or prolonged stress can sharpen judgments about accountability. 

The graver risk is that the image starts to replace the person it describes.

Criminal law has long assumed that someone who knows an act and chooses it bears responsibility. Brain injuries, neurological disorders and developmental differences strain that assumption, because they can weaken impulse control, decision-making, emotional regulation and the capacity to foresee consequences. 

Courts in several jurisdictions have examined such evidence in cases involving juveniles and intellectual disabilities. 

The scan decides nothing about guilt. It adds one fact about capacity, and that fact gains force only when interpreters decline to treat correlation as causation. 

An unusual structure may coexist with ordinary behaviour, and a statistical link between a neural feature and a type of action leaves open whether the feature produced the act under review. 

The difference sounds technical until a sentence hangs on........

© Kashmir Observer