Should genetic factors be cited as mitigating factors in criminal proceedings just as social factors already are?

In 1995, lawyers in America acting on behalf of the convicted murderer Stephen Mobley attempted to have his death sentence reduced to life imprisonment by claiming that there was a pattern of aggression (and, bizarrely, business success) in Mobley’s ancestry which suggested a relevant genetic aetiology underlying his criminal behaviour.

Even by the standards of the TV series Ally McBeal such an approach may strike one as desperate (the jury were clearly unimpressed; they rejected Mobley’s case and he remains on death row to this day) but the publication in September of a report by the Nuffield Council on Bioethics suggests that in the future such an approach may become far more widespread. The Philosophers’ Magazine