The Brain Defense: Murder in Manhattan and the Dawn of Neuroscience in America's Courtrooms

by Kevin Davis, reviewed by Glenn Altschuler,
Psychology Today, April 26, 2017

Many years after her then sixty-five year old father, who had no history of violent behavior, was accused of strangling her step-mother and throwing her body out of the window of their apartment in Manhattan, Joni Weinstein discovered that references to him (under the pseudonym Spyder Cystkopf) continued to appear in dozens of publications devoted to neuroscience and law. Although Joni understood that reasonable people would look at the empty space in Herbert Weinstein’s brain and conclude that it was not functioning normally, she agreed with the jury that he “bears responsibility for what he did and deserves prison time.”