What If Crimes Were No Longer A Matter of Free Will?

Remember the 2002 movie, starring Tom Cruise, entitled Minority Report? Based on a short story by Philip K. Dick, it was about a specialized police unit that apprehend criminals based on foreknowledge. In this case, from psychics call Precogs.

Now imagine if cutting edge brain scans and other biometric markers could actually determine if individual criminal behavior was forthcoming.

Or suppose we could literally look into the brains of criminals after they committed a crime, to determine if the cause was biologically determinative as opposed to the actions of free wil.l

Unlike Minority Report, this is not science fiction. This is taking place in courtrooms across America. Journalist Kevin Davis writes about this in The Brain Defense: Murder in Manhattan and the Dawn of Neuroscience in America's Courtrooms.

My conversation with Kevin Davis: