India’s Use of Brain Scans in Courts Is Debated: NY Times writer Anand Giridharadas, reports that India has become the first country to convict someone of a crime relying on evidence from a brain scan. This controversial machine involves a brain scanner that produces images of the human mind in action and is said to reveal signs that a suspect remembers details of the crime in question. The technologies, generally regarded as promising but unproved, have yet to be widely accepted as evidence — except in India. It was only in June, in a murder case in Pune, in Maharashtra State, that a judge explicitly cited a scan as proof that the suspect’s brain held “experiential knowledge” about the crime that only the killer could possess, sentencing her to life in prison. Some believe it could transform investigations as much as DNA evidence has. But many experts in psychology and neuroscience were troubled that it was used to win a criminal conviction before being validated by any independent study and reported in a respected scientific journal.

Dallas County DA Wants To Re-examine Nearly All Of Pending Death Row Cases: According to a story by Jennifer Emily and Steve McGonigle from the Dallas Morning News, District Attorney Craig Watkins, convinced by the problems exposed by 19 death penalty convictions, said he should ensure that no death row inmate is actually innocent. He wants to re-examine nearly 40 death penalty convictions and would seek to halt executions, if necessary, to give the reviews time to proceed. Toby Shook, who sent several people to death row while he was a Dallas County prosecutor, said Mr. Watkins was imposing an unnecessary new level of review and a hardship on victims' families. To halt an execution, judges from the trial court where the conviction was obtained would have to sign the order to approve withdrawing the execution date, said Dallas County state District Judge Andy Chatham. Judge Chatham, who signed the order to withdraw Mr. Lave's execution date, said Monday that any similar requests would need specific reasons for stopping the execution. Those reasons are DNA testing or a writ of habeas corpus that showed the need for additional court proceedings.