# Hypothetical Legal Question Involving Conjoined Twins.
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/hypothetical-legal-question-involving-conjoined-twins/771132
**Category:** Great Debates
**Created:** [November 9, 2016, 4:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/hypothetical-legal-question-involving-conjoined-twins/771132 "2016-11-09T04:50:16Z")
**Posts on this page:** 5
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@Jim\_B](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jim_B)
#### Post date: [November 9, 2016, 4:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/hypothetical-legal-question-involving-conjoined-twins/771132/1 "2016-11-09T04:50:16Z")
Something I conceived long ago. And let me lay down my hypothetical argument as well as I can (because as you will see, I can already guess what some of you might say).
Two conjoined twins. And it is not medically possible to separate them. One of them commits a serious crime, which the other had nothing to do with. (I can already hear some of you saying, if they are conjoined, the other had to be an accessory to the crime in some way. But indulge me: he didn’t.)
So how do you imprison him? To imprison one, is to imprison both, unavoidable. But the other one is totally innocent.
I trust you can see the dilemma. So how do you solve it?
And while we’re at it, has this ever come up before? We live in such a large and diverse world, I find it hard to believe it hasn’t, at least once.
:):):):)🙂
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### Author:  [@aldiboronti](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/aldiboronti)
#### Post date: [November 9, 2016, 5:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/hypothetical-legal-question-involving-conjoined-twins/771132/2 "2016-11-09T05:13:16Z")
From [Slate](http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/2010/01/if_a_siamese_twin_commits_murder_does_his_brother_get_punished_too.html)
> [@](#):
>
> … there have been a few recorded instances of conjoined criminality. By one account, the original Siamese twins, Chang and Eng Bunker, were arrested over a scuffle with a doctor who tried to examine them, but never prosecuted. Nor were they ever charged with bigamy, despite having taken two wives.
>
> Then there’s the case of the 17th-century Italian gentleman Lazarus Colloredo, who wore a cloak to conceal the protruding upper body of his brother Joannes Baptista. The historian Henri Sauval claims to have played the twins in a game of handball in Paris and that Lazarus afterwards boasted of having killed a man without repercussions, since his brother was innocent.
>
> A more recent case concerned the Filipino twins Lucio and Simplicio Godina, who as children were rescued from a Brooklyn, N.Y., sideshow, and later toured the United States as the “only pair of male Siamese twins on Earth.” In March 1925, newspapers claimed that Lucio had learned how to drive a car and been arrested after his vehicle grazed a carabao cart on a street in Manila. Simplicio supposedly appealed the case on the grounds that as an innocent man, he could not legally be incarcerated—and the judge let both twins go free. A similar story was reported in the New York Times in 1929: This time, Lucio was able to escape punishment for making an improper left turn in downtown Los Angeles.
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### Author:  [@Kamino\_Neko](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kamino_Neko)
#### Post date: [November 9, 2016, 5:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/hypothetical-legal-question-involving-conjoined-twins/771132/3 "2016-11-09T05:56:29Z")
On a side-topic…
> [@aldiboronti](#):
>
> From [Slate](http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/2010/01/if_a_siamese_twin_commits_murder_does_his_brother_get_punished_too.html)
_Chang and Eng Bunker, […] were they [n]ever charged with bigamy, despite having taken two wives._
Why _would_ they be? They each officially only had one wife - Adelaide was Chang’s wife, Sarah Eng’s. The relationship was certainly, necessarily unusual, but there was no bigamy, as Chang and Eng were not the same person in any sense.
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### Author:  [@UDS](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/UDS)
#### Post date: [November 9, 2016, 6:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/hypothetical-legal-question-involving-conjoined-twins/771132/4 "2016-11-09T06:24:08Z")
Well, couple of thoughts:
1. Not oppressing the innocent is, on the whole, more important than punishing the guilty. That’s why we have such a high burden of proof in criminal cases, for example. So if you have to choose, you choose not to oppress the innocent, even if that means you can’t punish the guilty.
2. Imprisonment isn’t the only sanction available for the punishment of the guilty. There may be other sanctions available which affect one twin but not the other (or the other to a much lesser extent). Like fines, for example, or the imposition of legal disabilities of one kind or another.
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### Author:  [@Folacin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Folacin)
#### Post date: [November 9, 2016, 12:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/hypothetical-legal-question-involving-conjoined-twins/771132/5 "2016-11-09T12:15:16Z")
> [@Jim\_B](#):
>
> Two conjoined twins. And it is not medically possible to separate them. One of them commits a serious crime, which the other had nothing to do with. (I can already hear some of you saying, if they are conjoined, the other had to be an accessory to the crime in some way. But indulge me: he didn’t.)
To defend the hypothetical, the criminal twin could be doing cyber-crime while his better half is sleeping.