Looking for the right intention: can neuroscience benefit from the law?

In a similar vein, at the end of the nineteenth century criminal anthropologist Cesare Lombroso argued that “criminals do not commit crimes out of their own free will, but they are urged to commit crimes because of their innate and primitive organic nature” (Lombroso, 1876, p. 29)1. [...]the deterministic argument that behavior is governed by factors that are not under human control has been proposed in the past, and it is not specific to neuroscience. By comparing the reported moment of the conscious intention “to move the finger now” with the EEG signal from motor areas responsible for preparing and executing the movement, it was observed that motor areas in the brain were activated around 1 s before participants reported the intention to move: the brain “knew” that the participant was going to move the finger well before the participant knew himself. According to the authors, this result provided the first empirical evidence that voluntary movements are initiated unconsciously, thereby questioning the traditional concept of free will. In a few recent studies combining a free-choice paradigm with functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), participants were asked to decide between a left and a right button press that they should execute at a freely chosen time (e.g., Soon et al., 2008).