I know of identical twin brothers, both of whom are fairly heavy drinkers. Here’s how they intend to muddy up a drunk driving charge, if pulled over for said reason. As soon as they’re pulled over, they exit their vehicle, rip off their shirts and immediately start rolling around on the ground together. By the time they are separated and are made to stand up, the officer has no idea which one was driving. What on earth would happen next?
WAG.
Obstruction of justice.
Tampering with evidence.
A bit OT, but identical twins in Cardiff prison in the UK managed to do the ol’ switcheroo during visiting time, and one of them served a few weeks of his brother’s sentence - until a keen-eyed warder noticed that the new inmate had a different name tattooed on his neck. Yes, they had their own names tattooed on their necks.
If they’re both drunk, it’s pretty obvious that at least one of them would have still been driving under the influence. At that point it’s who’s going to take the fall, and I doubt either is going to want a DUI on their record.
You have to do that to keep them sorted in the laundry.
Finger prints. Forensics on the seat for pants fibers. Review the video which can be stepped through. Shoot them both to make other people safe.
If this were an episode of Law & Order, ADA McCoy would bring drunk driving charges against both of them, possibly in separate trials. One of the defense attorneys would protest that he can’t simultaneously claim that they both committed the same crime.
Based on the discussion in GD on the denial of constitutional rights in DUI cases, I suspect BOTH brothers would be convicted.
And the term “depraved indifference” would get used at least once.
Based on that discussion, both brothers and their parents would be gut-shot and left to die by the side of the road.
In real life, probable cause exists to arrest them both. As others have suggested, there might be some evidence, such as a dashcam, which would definitively finger one.
Just one question: why would they rip off their shirts? Maybe it’s a guy thing, but I just don’t get it.
Presumably they’re not wearing identical shirts, so the cop would see the driver through the car window, and potentially be able to identify the driver by shirt design/color.
I don’t suppose you can get charged as an accessory to DUI? Conspiracy to commit DUI?
Don’t identical twins have identical finger prints ?
Nope, although they may have very similar patterns, identical twins do not have identical fingerprints. The minutiae, or the fine features, of your fingerprints actually form due to environmental stressors within the womb, as the fetuses are growing. Even though twins share a womb, they don’t necessarily undergo the same stresses as one another - think of a mother who always sleeps on one side during her pregnancy and how that creates a different situation for one twin than the other. (That’s just an example - I don’t know enough about exactly what conditions occur in the womb that affect fingerprints to give a more accurate example!)
So while they may each have a whorl pattern on their right thumb, for example, the finer details – such as the location of the triangular formations on either side of the whorl, called the deltas, and the formation of the core or central ridge in the whorl, or the location and direction of ridge bifurcations/spurs/short ridges, etc. – will be different enough to differentiate between the two individuals.
(Sorry for the double-post; didn’t realise you had to complete editing your post within a 5-minute window!)
The real problem with the fingerprints/fibres/full forensic examination suggestion is, of course, that real life isn’t like CSI and it is unlikely that any police force is going to spend the time, money, and manpower to carry out these examinations for a simple DUI stop, especially when both brothers are known to have been in the car!
Do the brothers often share the car? You’re likely to get both their fingerprints on the steering wheel, then. It’s difficult to determine which fingerprint is more recent than another, especially on something like a steering wheel or gear shift that is frequently not just touched but held, slid through hands, gripped with force, etc. Everything will be all smeary and hard to interpret. The passenger could just rub his hands all over the wheel before getting out of the car and really bung things up!
Fibre searching and comparison is incredibly time-consuming work that has a very limited ability to provide conclusions. For example, many pants types simply don’t shed that many fibres so you’re unlikely to find much on the seats in that regard anyway. And the most common type of pants, jeans; well … one blue cotton looks a hell of a lot like another! Fibre evidence is really only useful in loosely evaluating claims like “I never set foot in that car a day in my life!”, not conclusively disproving claims like “Yeah I was totally in the car, my brother and I share it all the time, I was driving it earlier today but I totally wasn’t driving it just now.”
I think a detailed analysis of the dashboard camera footage, or perhaps more easily, a Prisoner’s Dilemma type situation in interrogation, would be far more likely to sink your evil twins than a full forensic work-up. Sometimes, the answers really are that simple.
Huh. Learn something new every day. Thanks !
If your twin’s fingerprint got burnt off while he was baking bagels, would it grow back matching yours, or would that be yet a third fingerprint?
And, speaking from experience, the cops running away screaming like little girls from the thought of doing serious forensic work on something that isn’t a murder or a multi-million-$ case.
In fact, I’ve seen them choose to go another direction with an investigation when the forensics work involved was a long shot, even on a murder.
Actually, I remember this plot device being used on an episode of CHIPS, once, but it was female identical twins, who switched between the driver’s and passenger’s seats as they were being stopped.
Did they take their shirts off and roll around on the ground?