February 15, 2003	Saturday	Zul Hijjah 13, 1423

FAIRFIELD (USA): A technique called “brain fingerprinting” which seeks to probe whether a suspect has specific knowledge of a crime, could become a powerful weapon in national security, its inventor believes.

Lawrence Farwell, a Harvard-educated neuroscientist who founded Brain Fingerprinting Laboratories Inc. 12 years ago and runs the company from a small town in southern Iowa, believes the technique could emerge as the next big thing in law enforcement and intelligence.

“From a scientific perspective, we can definitively say that brain fingerprinting could have substantial benefits in identifying terrorists or in exonerating people accused of being terrorists,” Farwell said.

But first the controversial technique, which has had some success, must overcome the scepticism of some experts who are reluctant to embrace it.

Brain fingerprinting works by measuring and analyzing split-second spikes in electrical activity in the brain when it responds to something it recognises.

For example, if a suspected murderer was shown a detail of the crime scene that only he would know, his brain would involuntarily register that knowledge. Under Farwell’s system, that brain activity is picked up through electrodes attached to the suspect’s scalp and measured by an electroencephalograph (EEG) as a waveform.

A person who had never seen that crime scene would show no reaction.

Many scientists have studied the initial spike in brain activity, known as the p300, that peaks at between 300 and 500 milliseconds in response to a stimulus. Farwell’s contribution was to develop something he calls the MERMER (Memory and Encoding Related Multifaceted Electroencephalographic Response) that measures the pattern of brain response up to 1,200 milliseconds after the stimulus has been administered.

MURDER SOLVED: In 1999, Farwell used his technique to solve a 1984 murder in Missouri. Police strongly suspected a local woodcutter, James Grinder, of kidnapping, raping and murdering Julie Helton, a 25 year-old woman, but had lacked the evidence to convict him. He agreed to undergo brain fingerprinting to demonstrate his innocence.

Farwell flashed on a computer screen details of the crime that only the murderer would have known, including items taken from the victim, where the body was located, items left at the crime scene and details of the wounds on the corpse.

“What his brain said was that he was guilty,” he said. “He had critical, detailed information only the killer would have. The murder of Julie Helton was stored in his brain, and had been stored there 15 years ago when he committed the murder.”

Grinder pleaded guilty a week later in exchange for a sentence of life in prison, avoiding the death penalty. He also confessed to murdering three other young women.

In 2000, brain fingerprinting underwent its first legal challenge in the case of Terry Harrington, an Iowa man who had spent 23 years in prison for the 1978 murder of a security guard. Farwell’s tests suggested conclusively that Harrington was innocent since he did not have knowledge of the crime scene.

The judge in the case admitted the evidence but did not free the suspect, saying it was not clear test results would have led to a different verdict in the original trial. The case is before the Supreme Court of Iowa.

Farwell has done work for both the FBI and the CIA and has been contacted by foreign governments, including some in the Middle East.

Still, critics are dismissive.—Reuters