A recent development on the TV show Desperate Housewives has a character named Dave Williams falsely accusing Porter Scavo as an arsonist. It occurred to me that one of the ways Porter’s parents might try to protect their son is to use his identical twin brother Preston to cast doubt on Dave’s ability to positively identify Porter as the person he “saw.”
So, legal dopers, how would such a situation be handled in the real world by police or prosecutors? If there is no fingerprint evidence or an easy way to tell the twins apart, how would an accusation against one of a pair of identical twins be made to stick? Is there any way that they might both be imprisoned if the judge/jury is certain enough that one of them did the crime but no one can say for certain which one? (Possibly the other would be an accessory by helping the actual criminal hide his identity?)
I’m no lawyer, but that would seem to me to clearly violate the “reasonable doubt” rule. In fact, it’s an outright admission you have reasonable doubt.
Identification evidence by witnesses is notoriously unreliable, anyway. No well-directed jury would convict without more than that.
The Fox Twins were a pair of identical twins who committed many crimes in this way. While one made himself prominent in a town many miles distant the other committed poaching offences. Each blamed the other. Fingerprint evidence (new at the time) convicted them
Try to get evidence that will implicate one twin and not the other. Bring them both in for questioning separately. Tell them both you’re processing fingerprint evidence that’s going to identify the real perpetrator, and that things are going to go much easier for them if they man up and admit what they’ve done. Heck, you’ll even put in a good word for them with the district attorney for being such a stand up guy. Besides, what kind of guy is going to try let their twin brother go to prison for a crime they committed? The brother they shared a womb with for nine months? What’s a jury going to do to a guy like that? How is a guy like that going to look himself in the mirror for the rest of his life? Help yourself out and give us a statement. You’ll feel better.
Just for the record, and even though everyone who’s posted so far seems to understand this, identical twins don’t have identical fingerprints. There are also usually things like birthmarks and scars that can distinguish them. Most of the time, though, it’s a trivial problem, as in over 90% of the cases, the twin with the goatee is the evil one. Especially with female twins.
If they worked together (one committed the crime while the other helped), can you prosecute them both for conspiracy if you don’t know which one did it? Or do you have to prove one person committed the crime and one just conspired.
Much of this doesn’t really have anything intrinsically to do with twins. There are various other situations in which we could imagine ironclad evidence that one of Person A and Person B committed a crime, without any further evidence as to which specifically is the guilty party.
Along the same lines, here’s the story of identical twins who had sex with the same woman in the same time frame and neither one can be identified as the father of the resulting child.
I’ve actually investigated a case like this. It involved identical twins who got in a fight with another man, who was stabbed to death.
I had lots of witnesses, and the whole identification relied on one of them (the one with the knife) wearing a distinctive jacket.
He probably could have raised reasonable doubt by claiming that they switched jackets, but he never did. He fully admitted to stabbing the victim, but claimed (correctly, in my opinon and that of the jury) that it was in self defense and defense of his brother.
Ages ago I read a novella in Asimov’s magazine about a rape and murder that happened with clones. There was DNA evidence, fingerprints, video footage, and eyewitnesses saying they saw the man, but… there were five clones, all with airtight alibis, with multiple witnesses vouching for their whereabouts at the time of the murder. It was quite an interesting read.
We had a case where a prisoner received visits from his identical twin brother. We always assigned at least one guard to watch that specific visit to make sure there were no shenanigans.
On the other hand, I also worked at a prison where we had two guards who were identical twins. They convinced several prisoners (and a few fellow employees) that they were just one person who moved around a lot. Once it became common knowledge they were twins, they started telling people they were triplets and people tried to catch all three of them together in the same room.
I have known about 8 sets of identical twins very closely. Close enough to know that in 7 cases out of 8, one twin is right handed and the other is left handed. (I do know that the evidence is only anecdotal and is far from conclusive.)
In the case of the stabbing case in one of the above posts, can’t forensics usually determine whether a stab wound was inflicted by a right handed or left handed assailant.
Fingerprints, as a set, are pretty much unique. And I’d bet even clones would have different fingerprints, unless you’re talking the sci-fi ‘instant full-grown clone with full memories’ kind of clone.