Phillip Resnick, one of the leading witnesses in Andrea Yates' defense, certainly believes in the value of expert psychiatric testimony in court. He testified that delusions caused by postpartum psychosis qualified Yates for the insanity defense under the Texas standard. But while he completely disagrees with those who think Yates was guilty in any normal sense of the word for her killing her children, his reasons have nothing to do with fMRIs or other high-tech windows to the brain.

He drew his conclusions the old-fashioned way, a way that doesn't necessarily require a medical expert: by observing Yates and by talking to her and to people who knew her. He believed, from such evidence, that she was in the grip of psychotic delusions when she killed her kids, delusions that made her think that drowning them was in fact the right thing to do to save their souls.

Resnick's belief convinced the second jury, without any recourse to objective neuroscience and its promises to help us understand exactly what in our brains makes us think, feel, and act as we do. Even in the 21st century, our ability to make those kinds of legal and moral judgments remains largely untouched by purely objective science. To make the judgments about human beings and their behavior that courts need to make, Resnick says, "You need to understand why. And you can't see why on an fMRI."

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