The Brain Gets Its Day in Court (The Atlantic):

“The crime was brutal…Detrich is still on death row today as the appeals process drags on, but in 2010, his lawyers achieved a vic­to­ry of sorts. They claimed that Det­rich had received “inef­fec­tive assis­tance of coun­sel” at his tri­al, because his orig­i­nal legal team had failed to present evi­dence of neu­ropsy­cho­log­i­cal abnor­mal­i­ties and brain dam­age that might have swayed the court to give him a less­er sen­tence. A fed­er­al appeals court agreed. The rul­ing said, in effect, that Det­rich had been denied his Con­sti­tu­tion­al right to a fair tri­al because his lawyers hadn’t called an expert wit­ness to talk about his brain.

That judi­cial opin­ion is just one of near­ly 1,600 exam­ined in a recent study doc­u­ment­ing the expand­ing use of brain sci­ence in the crim­i­nal-jus­tice sys­tem. The study, by Nita Fara­hany at Duke Uni­ver­si­ty, found that the num­ber of judi­cial opin­ions that men­tion neu­ro­sci­en­tif­ic evi­dence more than dou­bled between 2005 and 2012.”

Study: Neu­ro­science and behav­ioral genet­ics in US crim­i­nal law: an empir­i­cal analy­sis (Jour­nal of Law and the Bio­sciences)