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. 2010 May;18(5):519-21.
doi: 10.1038/ejhg.2010.31. Epub 2010 Mar 10.

Italian appeal court: a genetic predisposition to commit murder?

Francesca Forzano  1 , Pascal Borry, Anne Cambon-Thomsen, Shirley V Hodgson, Aad Tibben, Petrus de Vries, Carla van El, Martina Cornel
Affiliations

Italian appeal court: a genetic predisposition to commit murder?

Francesca Forzano et al. Eur J Hum Genet. 2010 May.

Abstract

A few months ago, the controversial debate on connection between genetic variants and antisocial behaviour gained renewed prominence after the sentence of an Italian judge who decided to further reduce the prison sentence of a person convicted of murder by 1 year--from 9 to 8 years--because he was found to be a carrier of a few genetic variants thought to be associated with a predisposition to aggressiveness. We discuss the social implication of this view, the lack of evidence of the clinical utility of this test, and in particular the risks of offering susceptibility testing in the context of legal proceedings.

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