Some rampage killers have been captured instead of committing suicide or being shot by police. These murderers remain alive and can provide valuable biological data to prevent similar crimes from happening in the future. Brain scans conducted using several different technologies (SPECT, fMRI, qEEG) can identify abnormalities in their brains that are different from the brains of subjects in a control group. Genome sequencing could identify SNPs and abnormal DNA methylation.
This is not an exhaustive list, but some mass murderers captured alive include:
Anders Behring Breivik: Norwegian mass murderer
James Holmes: movie theater shooter
Jared Lee Loughner: killed people at a political event in Arizona
Martin Bryant: spree killer in Tasmania
Nidal Malik Hasan: psychiatrist and mass murderer at a military base
One Goh: shooter at a private college
Tomohiro Kato: Tokyo rampage killer
This list doesn’t include all the mass murderers in China who were captured and then executed shortly thereafter. Since China has a more vindictive legal system, the country can take the lead in analyzing the brains of mass murderers in greater detail than would be possible in America. This doesn’t necessarily mean using the death penalty to extract the brains of killers. It simply means using a variety of noninvasive brain imaging techniques immediately after an arrest rather than waiting for the endless procession of trials and appeals in the court system.
China also has fewer civil liberties, so it could implement a pre-crime system for identifying potential murderers before they kill. China also has the Beijing Genomics Institute – one of the world’s largest sequencing centers. BGI and similar centers could sequence the population on a large scale to detect SNPs associated with later criminal behavior and then closely monitor people who have a biological predisposition to violence.
The following posts describe some of the biological bases of criminal behavior:
1. Biological Influences on Criminal Behavior
