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Sleepwalking Research Paper

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I do believe that neuroscience can have a role in the criminal justice system. By reading some scenarios from a website, this has brought me to my answer on why I agree that it does. Let me share a story from the reading:

"In 1981 in Scottsdale, Arizona, Steven Steinberg murdered his wife in the middle of the night, driving a kitchen knife into her body 26 times. In court, Steinberg admitted to killing his wife, but pled not guilty by reason of temporary insanity. Steinberg claimed that he was sleeping at the time of the murder, and did not remember committing the atrocity. The defense argued that the act of murder was a dissociative reaction, meaning that it was produced by alterations in consciousness that were beyond Steinberg's control. The jury agreed, and Steinberg walked away a free man.

Sleepwalking, also known as somnambulism, is a phenomenon in which the body is awake and active but the mind remains asleep. The eyes are open and postural muscles are aroused, but conscious awareness is still suspended. It occurs during a portion of sleep called non-REM sleep, in which the muscles are not in the same near-paralysis state as seen during REM sleep. The dissociation between "body sleep" and "mind sleep" that occurs during sleepwalking results from the relative activation and deactivation or particular brain regions, research …show more content…

One man even sleep-drove to a gas station in the late night, where he was finally found filling up his tank. So, if Steinberg was truly sleepwalking and the murder was a dissociative reaction, is he free of all culpability? The jury believed so, but in the years following this case Arizona has revised their "temporary insanity" model to a "guilty but insane" model, in which those found guilty are sent to a mental institution for as long as a comparable prison sentence (Goldstein,

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