Laconia 1 - The free convicts

1. My first, and foreseeably only foray into science fiction.
2. A most interesting thing happened a day after I penned this and chapter 2 - I read this article in the January 2010 issue of the American Scientist. This stimulated a few more ideas - they'll find mention somewhere in chapter 3.
3. The conversation at the close of this chapter sounds lame - I know.
   

(Present day, AD 2010, National Law School of India University, Bangalore)

The moot court passionately debated the legality of the new clause in the sentencing rules of the IPC. The "rogue" clause had caught criminal lawyers unawares, disconnected as they were from developments in the relatively obscure field of neuro-electrics. The few that had heard of them while watching Discovery Channel probably dismissed them as pure fantasy. It must be said to their credit, however, that similar was the reaction of much of the scientific community.

Neurons form the basis on which the nervous system works. Each neuron, scientists knew, was basically a simple little cell, with connections to several other neurons. Based on the electrical signals transmitted to it by adjacent neurons, and its internal state, the neuron decides to itself send a signal to those around it. Much research had already been conducted in the computing sciences on the behavior of cellular automata, and it was just a matter of time before somebody connected the fields. Devices were built that could measure the electrical activity at the synapses and deduce the state of individual neurons. The neuro-electrics community claimed that these could be used to measure the "state of the brain," and thus provide a map of a person's thoughts at some instant. Other scientists were skeptical of such claims - since nobody knew how the neuron states mapped to specific thoughts, to do any such thing, one would have to treat the nervous system as a collection of a hundred billion neurons - if the state of each neuron were quantized into 8 bits, and assuming that the "brain clock" ticks 100 times every second, there would be 10 terabytes of data to analyse each second. And nobody knew whether 8 bits were sufficient to represent neuron state, or whether the brain indeed worked at 100 Hz, although some (controversial) experiments on human reflexes suggested some nearby number.

Like much scientific research nowadays, it was not a brilliant genius who came and provided the answer. The problem was worked on for several years by neuro-electrics groups around the world, and some three hundred research papers and seventeen hundred patents later, a workable system emerged. It employed several advances in machine learning, used some complex technology called thought recursion (observing the local brain response to determine the importance of neuron states), and a final few patents on "knowledge compression at source". About 100 MB of data needed to be downloaded each second now, sufficiently low to allow practical use - scientists were now able to observe a subject's thoughts with reasonable "resolution." The system was called "Brain-Tap," a harsh reminder of what this device actually was.

"It's a gross violation of a convict's right to privacy. With this the government has access to his political beliefs, his personal life,... even his toilet habits!" argued Mahesh, as the court observers erupted in laughter.

"In jail, the convict would have little privacy too. And since he's sentenced for life, he might as well get used to it the easy way," countered Yogi Bhat, his classmate in the third year of the law programme.

"Ok boys. It is time," said the criminal law professor Dr. Acharya. "Your debate today was commendable, but unfortunately for you, Mahesh, the Supreme Court has already passed its ruling on the constitutionality of the new clause. Boys, I suggest you read the full text of the ruling, which you will find in this month's Bar Gazette. I suspect you'll be seeing a lot of applications of this one clause later in your legal careers."

The said clause stated that a criminal sentenced to life in prison could escape incarceration if he underwent a month's psychiatric therapy, and willingly had Brain-Tap installed on him. Large scale strikes had been called by lawyers and civil rights groups across the nation. The matter had been referred to the Supreme Court, which was urged to declare the clause unconstitutional. Unfortunately, the court cited the overcrowding of jails, and in a one-thousand-page report overturned the petition. The new provision had come to stay.