How would the courts handle it if a conjoined twin commits a crime, but their twin does not? Like if twin A shoots someone while twin B struggles to stop him? Is there any legal precedent for such a thing?
I think the answers will be mostly speculative, so let’s move this to IMHO.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
Maybe he would be charged with Aiding and Abutting.
This question was covered by the Explainer column from Slate. Short answer is that conjoined twins are rare enough that this has probably never occurred, although the article mentions a couple of possibly-not-true stories.
The movie Chained for Life starring real life conjoined twins, the Hilton Sisters, takes on this question.
And I believe there was a thread on this not so long ago.
mc
Honestly, at this point there’s probably been a thread on everything.
It’s automatically a conspiracy.
Nice find, I guess no matter what weird question I think up, someone’s asked it and answered it already.
Hell, there’s probably a Seinfeld episode about it.
This was mentioned on QI once. According to Stephen Fry, one of them punched someone but got away with it because judge couldn’t jail the innocent twin.
He said it happened to Chang and Eng Bunker, the original Siamese Twins. It didn’t actually happen. It was a hypothetical pointraised shortly after they died.
Stephen Fry lied to me? :eek:
Put a lock-box over the guilty one’s head. It opens for feeding on a timer system, and is removed after the appropriate term expires.
Or just give them a pass because, you know, conjoined.
Now you’re thinking. You could do other things, like put on headphones running an endless loop of Justin Bieber or whoever the latest pop monstrosity is.
I believe the best answer would be to incorporate the sibling into the sentence, there would have to be a very special allowance made for this type of situation. Perhaps the sibling can be the probationary officer for the convicted person. This assumes the twin wants that position. This along with corrective counseling.
Well now that I think about it, this is how the system should work for all, not by punishment, but to rehabilitate, both twins should benefit from having the one twin reform, no wasted resources used in punishment which does not work but all to help the person in need.
If the good twin however does not want any part of helping his sibling and proclaims that as not being found guilty he should bear no penalty, I’d say that under the principal that better for 100 guilty people go free then one innocent person serve time, the bad twin has to be set free, but perhaps with probation check in and a criminal mark on his record, which might be challenged by the good twin.
The guilty twin goes inside the jail cell, the other gets to wander free outside the cell. That’s why they have bars instead of walls.
[sub]Maybe?[/sub]
…and he told you that more people die from falling coconuts than from shark attacks. Hmmm.
j
Maybe he meant more die from falling coconuts than falling sharks.
Wait. How many falling sharks really get killed by falling coconuts? And… Why? 