Science in Court: Head Case

Brian Dugan, dressed in an orange jumpsuit and shackles, shuffled to the door of Northwestern Memorial Hospital in downtown Chicago, accompanied by four sheriff deputies. It was the first time that Dugan, 52, had been anywhere near a city in 20 years. Serving two life sentences for a pair of murders he had committed in the 1980s, he was now facing the prospect of the death penalty for an earlier killing.Dugan was here on a Saturday this past September to meet one of the few people who might help him to avoid that fate: Kent Kiehl, a neuroscientist at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. Dugan, Kiehl and the rest of the entourage walked the length of the hospital, crossed a walkway to another building, and took the lift down to a basement-level facility where researchers would scan Dugan's brain using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Todd Parrish, the imaging centre's director, offered plastic zip ties to replace the shackles — no metal is allowed in the same room as the scanner's powerful magnet — but the guards said they weren't necessary. Dugan entered the machine without restraints, and Parrish locked the door — as much to keep the guards and their weapons out as to keep Dugan in.Read more at...Nature, March 2010. Or listen to the podcast.