Question: what would constitute a "mitigating circumstance" for sentencing? what are some interesting examples of a mitigating circumstance in real life? How does this affect decisions? Can this be good or bad? In what way?
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Great questions: I think almost all difficulty arising from mitigating circumstances revoles around a single issue: to what extent did this person exercise their freewill in committing the crime?
In the case of neurology, lesions, tumours and seizures may all contribute to the destruction of awareness of what is socially or ethically correct behaviour. Thus this same capacity for exercising freewill is diminished, however the degree to which this is accepted varies across a country by country basis and in the US state by state.
Issues of neuroscience are notoriously difficult to assess when it comes to the application of freewill.