Putting criminals committing homicides to death has been a very controversial issue in a lot of nations although many countries across the world have abolished the death sentence. Many a time, we read news about the brutal behaviours of what people call, ‘cold-blooded’ killers and felt chills creeping up our spine. We asked ourselves: how could a person did something so cruel to others?
On the side of social moral, killing or taking away others’ life by force has been deemed a serious crime or even in the religious term, sin. However, neuroscientists now are discovering that some of the ‘cold-blooded’ killers might not be what we previously thought they were, namely-they are not bad, they are actually suffering brain abnormality which renders them being so emotionless and vicious.
In the issue of Scientific American, Mind (Sep/Oct, 2010), Kent A. Kiehl and Joshua W. Buckholtz have a study regarding the mind of a psychopath. The word, ‘psychopath’, makes most of us think of the movie images such as Anthony Hopkins’s Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs. Yet, in reality, many psychopaths could be likable people when they want to be according to real-life cases. This, therefore, becomes a very challenging part in terms of studying psychopaths, meaning these culprits show none of the classic signs of mental illness, hallucinations, or hearing voices. They do not even appear socially-awkward. On the contrary, they often possess better-than-average intelligence. The bizarre part of psychopaths is usually that they lack of empathy; and that is why they can kill others showing no regret and mercy at all. Based on the new studies, doctors and neuroscientists are speculating that people with the damage in the area of paralimbic system, a horseshoe-shaped band of tissue nestled in the deepest recesses of the brain, may develop psychopathic traits and behaviours. This paralimbic system includes several interconnected bran regions which register feelings and sensations and assign emotional value to experiences.
I personally think the research demonstrated another noteworthy approach regarding how we should treat ‘cold-blooded’ killers. Perhaps government should spend more time and resources locating the real problem of those killers and prevent more tragedies from happening. The recent news about a man who had killed two young girls was released after serving in jail for six years because of the judicial law change and the claim that he had mental illness. The ironic and sad part is that he committed homicides again after he came of out the prison a year later. If the probing of a ‘cold-blooded’ killer’s mind can be taken into consideration when dealing with this sort of case, perhaps neuroscientists can find and determine whether a serious criminal suffers from abnormality in his or her paralimbic system, thus giving him or her appropriate treatments. After all, if a person cannot feel empathy or in a more layperson’s term, has no heart, it seems a bit unfair to blame him or her so much. This certainly is a very tricky issue as most of us feel angry and indignant when hearing news about some killer that tormented a victim with atrocious and horrific ways before ending the victim’s life.
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