This is entirely a hypothetical situation, as you’ll see, but I thought it up and couldn’t come to a good conclusion myself.
Imagine that we have a person, who is believed to have comitted a crime. However, while on the run after the act has taken place, he is cloned, to create an identical physical copy. What is more, the memories of the man are also copied into the clone, correct and full up to the point of the cloning. The police burst in on the scene.
Should both men be tried for the crime?
No. Only one did the act. If you did not do the act (legally, the actus rea) you cannot be guilty of the crime.
Say they both say “It was me!”. How would you know which one to charge?
Since they both have the memories, they could both, legitimately as far as they know, confess. A defense attorney would have a field day.
What you have constructed is not a clone. Cloning would create an identical twin baby of the donor. Cloning doesn’t create an identical physical copy of someone, it creates a new person who isn’t a copy. It certainly doesn’t create an adult.
But even if you could create an adult clone, implanting someone else’s memories into that other person wouldn’t make them the first person. Suppose the criminal captured you, and implanted his memories into you. You might believe yourself to be the criminal, but you wouldn’t be. I would imagine that altering another person’s memories this way would be a crime almost as bad as murder.
If you want to talk about a Star Trek style replicator that produces an exact copy of the criminal, then you’ve got a different situation. Neither is a copy, both are originals.
Depending on the severity of the crime, would it be justifiable to sentence them both if one wouldn’t confess? Say the criminal had left a bomb in a train station, killing hundreds?
You realize, of course, that the clone would be only an embryo, not the age of the original person, and quite incapable of committing a crime. You do realize that, right?
Supposing that any of this were even possible, we could further suppose a clone could be force-grown to the criminal’s own actual age.
I would say yes, both of them can and should be arrested for the crime. The point of prison is to get dangerous people off the street; if the clone is functionally identical to the original he is, indisputably, an equal danger to society.
No, I don’t. It hasn’t yet crossed my mind. Perhaps at some point in the future it may do so. We can but hope, I guess.
Oh, for Pete’s sake. The OP laid out the terms to specify an adult clone with the same memories/mind. He is clearly not talking about currently-possible genetic cloning. He’s talking about sci-fi replication*
*First person to mention mitosis or RFLP gets a kick to the groin))
Let’s say it’s an experimental matter transmitter that has a malfunction and produces two identical copies of one person. So there’s no nitpicking about cloning and there’s no way to determine which one is the “original”.
IANAL, but I’d say that there’s no case law to cover such a situation. Why would there be? So this would end up before the Supreme Court to decide what the applicable law is.
In my uninformed opinion, they’d both be liable.
In my only slightly informed opinion, the would both be not-guilty if both confessed. The state could not possibly prove its case beyond reasonable doubt as to which committed the act. No act, no crime.
The criminal should be tried and the machine that resembles him should be destroyed.
I disagree, Hello Again. If we can only make one of them liable for the crime, then only one of them gets to plead his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.
And if we’ve got a brain-wave-pattern-copy-machine-thingy then we can certainly use it to scan one or the other of them.
Uh, what? In the case that BOTH are charged and either both confess and both say nothing, the state will be unable to prove its case BRD.
And each person who sits before a court can choose not to self-incriminate. The person not charged with a crime is not before the court, and cannot be found guilty.
Yeah, but it might simply duplicate without understanding the internal bits. A photocopier doesn’t know what text is on the page its copying.
On topic, I’d say that both should go to jail. All you’ve done is created two guilty men. The mind is what’s guilty, not the atoms that were there at the crime.
Only one of them actually did it. So if he pleads the Fifth against self-incrimination, you get a copy of the other guy’s brain waves to use in court.
Crime = mens rea (guilty mind) + actus rea (guilty act)
No act, no crime, just bad thoughts. Dreaming of stabbing your mother in law is not a crime, no matter hoe real it seems. The clone is the dreamer, who distinctly recalls something he did not do.
So, let’s dial back a minute here. You gain the protection of the 5th amendment by being charged with a crime (not by doing the crime). 2 men stand before you. Which do you charge?
Here’s another current thread dealing with the issue of identity in ‘self-copying’ scenarios.
In the case present here, it seems intuitively obvious that only one of them did the deed, thus only one of them is culpable. However, what if we made the copy, and then destroyed the original? Have we then destroyed the guilt, as well? How about disassembling the original into its constituent molecules, then re-assembling it (both from the same, and a different, but identical set of molecules)? How about merely replacing each of his molecules with a different, but identical one? In effect, those are all fundamentally the same act, yet my intuition regarding the question of guilt flip-flops all over the place. It seems as clear to me that the original with all molecules replaced is just as guilty as the copy whose original has been destroyed is innocent, yet both are fundamentally the same, created by a fundamentally identical action.
Again, as in the other thread, I maintain that the notion of a consistent ‘you’ is merely a convenient fantasy; how that relates to the question of guilt stumps me, however.