Psychopathy, Executive Functions, and Neuropsychological Data: a Response to Sifferd and Hirstein
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Psychopathy, Executive Functions, and Neuropsychological Data: a Response to Sifferd and Hirstein Marko Jurjako
&
Luca Malatesti
Received: 13 June 2016 / Accepted: 15 November 2016 # Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2016
Abstract Katrina Sifferd and William Hirstein, in their paper ‘On the criminal culpability of successful and unsuccessful psychopaths’, argue that neuropsychological data show that unsuccessful psychopaths have diminished mental capacities that warrant a partial or diminished responsibility defence. We respond that the currently available neuropsychological evidence does not warrant their conclusion that unsuccessful psychopaths should not be deemed completely legally responsible. Instead, we maintain that the current state of this type of research suggests that psychopaths might be suffering very specific cognitive impairments. However, the impact that these impairments might have on the specific criminal behaviours that courts have to assess is far from clear. Keywords Executive function . Legal responsibility . Neuropsychological evidence . Psychopathy . Sifferd . Hirstein
… not broken, just bent …. -Pink. Marko Jurjako and Luca Malatesti contributed equally to this work. M. Jurjako (*) : L. Malatesti Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, CEASCRO Project, University of Rijeka, Rijeka, Croatia e-mail: [email protected] L. Malatesti e-mail: [email protected]
Introduction Katrina Sifferd and William Hirstein in their paper ‘On the criminal culpability of successful and unsuccessful psychopaths’ [1] have argued that neuropsychological data show that unsuccessful psychopaths have impairments in their executive functions (from now on EF) that would warrant a partial or diminished responsibility defence. Generally, successful psychopaths have standard psychopathic personality traits: they are unemotional, callous, glib, manipulative, pathological liars, etc. However, they usually have no criminal records and rarely come into contact with the criminal law. Unsuccessful psychopaths, in addition, have criminal records and often are entangled with legal systems [2, ch. 7]. EF include a class of processes such as attention, decision-making, reasoning, problem solving, memory, and inhibition of action that are at the focus of much current neurocognitive research [3]. In this paper, we object to their conclusion. We recognise that their proposal has several methodological merits. We argue, however, that it ultimately fails because the current neuropsychological literature on the EF of psychopaths does not support the conclusion that unsuccessful psychopaths are impaired so severely to lack or have diminished criminal responsibility. In fact, we show that current neuropsychological studies on EF in psychopaths offer mixed results. Moreover, we argue that none of the most plausible interpretations of these inconsistences, that are advanced by experts in the field, support, at least without further argument, a line of reasoning of the type offered b
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