A court in Mumbai, India has achieved, indeed far surpassed, the decades-long dream of “going paperless” — of eliminating paper and paperwork, replacing it with electronic technology. According to a July 21st, 2008 report in the Times of India:
MUMBAI: The state police can now bank on a forensic tool to achieve speedy convictions. For the first time in Maharashtra, life sentences were meted out to the accused based on the findings of Brain Electrical Oscillation Signature (BEOS) profiling. Reports of these tests, conducted at the state forensic lab in Kalina, were held admissible in sessions courts in two brutal cases of murder….
During BEOS profiling, an accused is asked not to give answers verbally; experiential knowledge is retrieved from his brain. Experiential knowledge is acquired only through participation in an event, leading the person to have an experience of that activity. The technique detects and differentiates whether the accused was actually involved in committing a crime or only learnt of it. It helps in the reconstruction of events.
“BEOS involves the application of electro-encephalogram. Electrodes are attached to different parts of the brain to detect electrical activation in the brain. The accused is asked to wear a cap with 32 electrodes, of which two are placed on each earlobe and rest on various parts of the brain. Probes (short questions) are recorded in a computer and presented to an accused. He is asked to sit with eyes closed and listen to the probes,” director of the state forensic lab, Rukmani Krishnamurthy, told TOI.
This may also have the side effect of reducing the cost of future legal proceedings.
Nearly every scientific test of this technology (and of nearly all lie-detector technology) has found it to be unreliable. Having now decided that the scientific community is simply wrong about the tests being wrong, the court can now eliminate the time and expense that would come from asking scientists to testify, about anything, in future court cases of any kind. Court cases can be conducted automatically, more or less, leading to just decidions, more or less.