But there are several problems about the case Ted has never seen before:

1.  The murder victim’s body has not been found.  Can the prosecutor still prove murder without a body?  And did Dan really kill her or did someone else break into the house, as Dan’s says, and kill his wife.  Can Ted and his investigator find this mysterious stranger in time to win Dan’s trial?

2.  Dan has served in Afghanistan and came back with a mental condition known as the Amygdala Hijack.  It means that a part of the brain, the amygdala, fires before the rational parts of the brain.  It causes the person to do crazy things—often violent—which are out of their control.  Did Dan really kill his wife while under an amygdala hijack?  Or, can Ted use this as a mental illness defense in his client’s trial—even though the mental illness defense law in Minnesota is a hundred years old?  Can Ted convince the judge to update the law?

3.  In his previous work as a prosecutor, Ted was fired for something he did wrong.  It tore apart his family so that when he takes on Dan’s case, Ted’s wife threatens to leave him for good.  Can Ted get the mystery solved and the case won before his wife and family are gone?

I also did tons of research about technical aspects of crime solving.  The sheriff’s office uses a new,underwater vehicle to search for the murder victims, body, Ted is educated about blood stain analysis from the crime scene, and he even learns about jazz music from his investigator, a black woman who was a former cop and plays the saxophone.

Check here on Amazon:http://www.amazon.com/Aymgdala-Hijack-Rohrbacher-Criminal-Defense-ebook/dp/B00OKILWH8/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1413838242&sr=1-4&keywords=colin+nelson

The post My New Book–The Amygdala Hijack appeared first on Colin T. Nelson.

For 150 years, courts have recognized that people who have a significant mental illness may be found not guilty of a crime—even it they did the crime.  The Amygdala Hijack is a term psychologists use for an activity in the brain where it goes “haywire.”  Each of us has two parts (and more, of course!) to our brains.  They’re called the neocortex and the amygdala.  The neocortex is the thinking, rational part that over rides the primitive, impulsive part called the amygdala.  We need both because in times of danger, the amygdala fires and tells us to run!  In other situations, where we may be tempted, at first. to violence the neocortex acts.  It tells us to “think before acting.”  See this article in Psychology Today.  http://www.psychologytoday.com/files/attachments/51483/handling-the-hijack.pdf

However, for people who suffer from post traumatic stress disorder, the brain is slightly jumbled.  PTSD means the person has experienced a traumatic incident that scarred them.  It’s so bad they continue to re-live the situation.  Even in the absence of an actual threat.  The person’s brain sees the threat while the amygdala fires to warn the body.  It fires so  fast that it “hijacks” the neocortex so the brain/body act impulsively as if the threat were real.

So far, there aren’t any states that accept the amygdala hijack as a defense.  But PTSD was tried during the 1980s.  Particularly for Vietnam vets and the Battered Woman Syndrome, lawyers attempted to convince courts to allow the defense.

The weirdest case was the “Twinkie” defense.  The accused was found not guilty because he’d eaten dozens of Twinkies right before the crime.  He was so full of sugar his brain malfunctioned.  Of course, this happened in a California court—no one else agrees with it.

But there is a lot of legitimate research and psychological experts that say our legal system is long over-due for an up date into the 21st Century regarding mental illness.

What do you think?  Should we open the doors to the use of these mental illness defenses?

In my own research for the new book, I created a character who is accused of killing his wife.  The defense lawyer, Ted Rohrbacher, wants to try the amygdala hijack as a defense.  The prosecutor fights him every inch of the way.  There’s another problem, too.  No one can find the wife’s body.  So, can the husband be found guilty of murder if there’s no body to prove she died?  Even if he did kill her, can he get off because his brain was hijacked by the amygdala?

The book’s coming out soon!  I’ll let you know when.

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