People v. Weinstein

Herbert Weinstein (defendant), charged with second-degree murder for allegedly strangling his wife and staging her death as a fall from their twelfth-floor window, asserted a lack of criminal responsibility due to mental disease or defect, supported by a psychiatrist's opinion drawing on PET brain scans showing a cyst and metabolic abnormalities, and skin-conductance-response (SCR) testing showing frontal-lobe damage. The prosecution moved to exclude the PET scan and SCR evidence, and the court held an evidentiary hearing establishing that PET scans were generally accepted for measuring brain glucose metabolism, while SCR testing, though not generally accepted, had shown some documented success identifying frontal-lobe damage in studies.