Currently, several defendants attempt to blame their own genetic constitution for their crimes and to ask for penalty mitigation during court sentencing. This raises issues of both ethical and moral nature mainly concerning the influence of biological factors on human free will, the risk of incurring in a deterministic eugenic science, the distinction between scientific knowledge sensu strictu (epistemological) and knowledge in a
broader sense (gnoseological), the problem of the interpretation of scientific research data, and the problem of the sentence and its reduction.