Medical tests help reduce sentence of woman accused of murder

A criminal court in Como, northern Italy, has accepted genetic and neuroscientific tests, including neuroimaging, as evidence that a young murderer was only partly responsible for her crime because of reduced capacity.

Previous testimony in the case from two clinical evaluations had come to the opposite conclusion, but the judge was finally convinced by evidence from a third evaluation, presented by the defence, that involved neuroscientific and genetic tests in addition to a thorough psychiatric examination. The judge considered these conclusions to be “more reliant on objectivity and evidence” than those that were based only on a traditional clinical approach.

The sentence given to …