About morality and crime

At Palima village in Kalihati Upazila in Tangail, Harunur Rashid Mondol had allegedly tortured his wife Amena Begum to death on Monday, June 30. The husband was 28-year-old and his wife 10 years his junior. On Tuesday, Mondol was arrested by police. On Wednesday, as he was brought to the court of the Chief Judicial Magistrate in Tangail for hearing he found an opportune moment to jump from an upper story of the court building and he was dead. It was apparently a suicide.
Few people would mourn Mondol's death. Many would rather have been glad if he was hanged to death. That he killed himself would bring some relief to the relatives of his murdered wife. His neighbours would say he was a bad husband and his mother would say his son was innocent.
What actually had driven Mondol to act so violently and commit two murders: one homicide and the other suicide? He obviously lost his sanity when he jumped to death.
Besides, there are other questions that could crop up in people's mind. Did the alleged criminal repent his sins and then find in death an outlet for all his remorse? Was there any element of doubt in the crime incident that could convince the judge to give the alleged a benefit of doubt?
Whenever we hear or read about a crime we bristle with rage. We paint the alleged criminal in our mind as a demon. Before even a trial of a crime is completely over we raise slogans on the streets and jump to a conclusion that the alleged criminal should be given a sentence no less than a death by hanging. Never do we try to give the alleged criminal a minimum possible benefit of doubt.
Should not we take a pause and reflect over the root causes of why one becomes so violent to commit a crime or wonder whether the crime at all did take place?
MODERN BRAIN SCIENCE: All of us are often confronted with feelings of disappointment and anger as we interact with our friends, co-workers, family and neighbours. Most of us can control our actions to the extent that relatively few of these interactions end in violence. Many of us have been taught to channel our pent-up anger and frustration to non-destructive outlets. But there are people who are unable to control rage or disappointment; they usually become violent to commit a crime like a homicide.
But, why do some individuals act on their violent thoughts whereas others do not? Psychologists and psychoanalysts would categorise the people who cannot control their emotions as irrational and blame their mirror neurons, a small circuit of cells in our brain, which are responsible for social cognition. When one commits, say, a homicide or suicide, it is believed by the psycho scientists that his cognitive control mechanisms have gone awry.
But modern brain science has revealed that our brain is much more complex than what the biologists have traditionally thought it about. The scientists have started doubting whether it is fair to punish someone for a crime over which he had no control of his own. Advances in brain science are calling into question the very volition behind many criminal acts.
A few months back I completed an online course titled "Moralities in everyday life" that was offered for free by Yale University in the USA. David Eagleman in his paper The Brain on Trial, which we had to study during the course, says: "When it comes to nature and nurture, the important point is that we choose neither one. We are each constructed from a genetic blueprint, and then born into a world of circumstances that we cannot control in our most-formative years. The complex interactions of genes and environment mean that all citizens-equal before the law-possess different perspectives, dissimilar personalities, and varied capacities for decision-making. The unique patterns of neurobiology inside each of our heads cannot qualify as choices; these are the cards we're dealt."
THE CASE OF CHARLES WHITMAN: Here below is a poignant story about Charles Whitman that I came to learn during the course:
Charles Whitman studied architectural engineering at the University of Texas. As a child, he had scored 138 on the Stanford-Binet IQ test, placing in the 99th percentile.
On the first day of August 1966, Charles Whitman took an elevator to the top floor of the University of Texas Tower in Austin. The 25-year-old climbed the stairs to the observation deck, lugging with him a footlocker full of guns and ammunitions. At the top, he killed a receptionist with the butt of his rifle. Two families of tourists came up the stairwell; he shot at them at point-blank range. Then he began to fire indiscriminately from the deck at people below. The first woman he shot was pregnant. As her boyfriend knelt to help her, Whitman shot him as well. He shot pedestrians in the street and an ambulance driver who came to rescue them. By the time the police shot him dead, Whitman had killed 13 people and wounded 32 more.
When police went to investigate his home for clues, the story became even stranger: in the early hours of the morning on the same day of the shooting, he had murdered his mother and stabbed his wife to death in her sleep.
The evening before, Whitman had sat at his typewriter and composed a suicide note: "I don't really understand myself these days. I am supposed to be an average reasonable and intelligent young man. However, lately (I can't recall when it started) I have been a victim of many unusual and irrational thoughts. It was after much thought that I decided to kill my wife, Kathy, tonight … I love her dearly, and she has been as fine a wife to me as any man could ever hope to have. I cannot rationally pinpoint any specific reason for doing this …"
He then requested in his suicide note that an autopsy be performed to determine if something had changed in his brain-because he suspected it had.
'THE BRAIN ON TRIAL': Accordingly, Whitman's body was taken to the morgue, his skull was put under the bone saw, and the medical examiner lifted the brain from its vault. The examiner discovered that Whitman's brain harboured a tumour of the diameter of a nickel. This tumour, called glioblastoma, had blossomed from beneath a structure called the thalamus, impinged on the hypothalamus, and compressed a third region called the amygdala.
The amygdala in human brain is involved in emotional regulation, especially of fear and aggression. By the late 1800s, researchers had discovered that damage to the amygdala caused emotional and social disturbances. In the 1930s, the researchers Heinrich Klüver and Paul Bucy demonstrated that damage to the amygdala in monkeys led to a constellation of symptoms, including lack of fear, blunting of emotion, and overreaction. Female monkeys with amygdala damage often neglected or physically abused their infants.
In humans, activity in the amygdala increases when people are shown threatening faces, are put into frightening situations, or experience social phobias. Whitman's intuition about himself-that something in his brain was changing his behaviour-was spot-on.
Stories like Whitman's are not uncommon. Legal cases involving brain damage are cropping up increasingly in many countries including USA. As the scientists develop better technologies for probing the brain, they are detecting more problems, linking them to aberrant human behaviour.
THE BANGLADESH SCENARIO: Now, the questions are: Whether Harunur Rashid Mondol of Palima village in Kalihati Upazila in Tangail was a Charles Whitman of Texas in the USA? Is there any opportunity in the legal system in Bangladesh to determine whether Mondol had a tumour like that of Whitman or something else that disturbed the amygdala portion of his brain? Is our judiciary equipped with knowledge on modern neurology-based jurisprudence and other modern logistics that may help judges probe deeply into the root causes of a crime and dispense justice after weighing the crime on a scale of science when the scale of law is not sufficient?
When today an alleged criminal stands in front of a judge bench in Bangladesh, shouldn't our legal system want to know whether he has a problem that is disturbing the amygdala portion of his brain, whether the crime was his fault, or his biology's fault?
The more the scientists discover about the circuitry of the brain, the more we have to tip away from accusations of indulgence and toward the details of biology. It is now time to shift from traditional blame to the latest brain science that reflects the understanding that our perceptions and behaviours are steered by deeply embedded neural programmes inside our grey matter.
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