The very first federal admissibility hearing for fMRI lie-detection evidence wrapped up May 14 in a Tennessee court room. The decision, expected in a couple weeks, could have a significant influence on the direction that brain scan evidence takes in the courtroom.
A special session was held to determine whether brain scans that were generated by the company Cephos could be entered as evidence in the federal court case of Lorne Semrau, whom the government has accused of defrauding Medicare and Medicaid.
FMRI brain scan evidence has yet to be admitted for lie detection in court, and this case is the most serious consideration yet of the technique in an American court.
“It’s in some ways a potentially watershed moment,” said Owen Jones, a professor of law and biological sciences at Vanderbilt University, one of the few hearing observers in the nearly empty court room. “I had the sense throughout that, whichever this court decides, this was going to be a significant moment.”
In federal court, the admissibility of scientific evidence is governed by the Daubert standard, first established in the early 1990s. To be entered into the record, scientific evidence has to be empirically testable, subjected to peer review, have a calculable error rate, and be generally accepted by a relevant scientific community. Through a pretrial hearing, a judge decides whether the evidence offered meets these criteria.
In the Semrau case, Steven Laken, CEO of Cephos, is the expert witness whom the defense would use to bring in the brain scan evidence. He testified at the Daubert hearing on May 13 and 14. He was followed by plaintiff’s witnesses’ Marcus Raichle, a neuroscientist at Washington University in St. Louis, and Peter Imrey, a biostatistician at the Cleveland Clinic.
A transcript will likely become available, but in the meantime, Wired.com spoke with Jones, who is also the incoming director of the MacArthur Foundation Law and Neuroscience Project.
Wired.com: What was the tack the defense took in making its case?
Owen Jones: Their basic effort was devoted to demonstrating two things. First, that fMRI technology itself is sound, and second, that this specific application of fMRI to lie detection is sound and scientifically credible. There was much discussion of publications. Through Laken, the defense walked the judge through understanding a bit about how the technology worked and how the test was administered and why some people in the lie-detection community consider this technique to be scientifically valid.
Wired.com: What points did the prosecution focus on in cross-examination?
Jones: They focused on the fact that this would be the first case in which fMRI brain scan evidence like this would be admitted. Reference was made to the recent Brooklyn case, where it was not admitted. And there was some discussion about the extent to which Cephos stands to gain financially if this technique becomes widely acceptable. One of the things highlighted was the seeming inconsistency between some scans Cephos did of Semrau, some of which suggested that he was lying and some of which suggested that he was telling the truth. There was much discussion on Laken’s basis for discounting the scan session in which the conclusion was that the defendant was lying. Laken discounted the evidence because of the alleged fatigue of the defendant.
There was discussion on cross on general ecological validity, which means the degree to which real-world situations conform to the experiments done in the laboratory. The prosecution pointed out that there was a long duration between the event in question and the scan itself, roughly six to eight years. There was also much discussion about the difference in age between the defendant and the maximum and also median ages of subjects in published research studies. Semrau is 63 or 64, and in prior studies the oldest subjects were 50.
Certainly there was a lot of discussion about the alleged accuracy rates of the technology. And that’s obviously one of the important factors in the Daubert standard. The scientific expert is claiming that they have 100 percent accuracy at finding liars.
There was also discussion about the nature of the questions administered. Some of the questions were short. Some were long. Some were highly detailed. Others were quite general. So, there were questions about the methodology of the test and whether they were sound.
There was also a heavy emphasis on the extent to which the published studies do not have subjects for whom there are real and significant consequences for failing the truth verification tests. That very specifically raises the question about whether the published studies are at all relevant to this particular case.freedom
liberty
tranquillity
peace
are you in the blossomhttp://forum.boserauto.de
http://www.chiangmai.hotwebboard.com/cm
http://www.enemyone.com/forum
http://www.kaau.org
http://freeproxies.biz/forum
