Legal News

A Legal Question With No Answer?

By Ashby Jones

We’re big fans of Slate’s “Explainer” column, which has been up and running for almost a decade now.

The purpose of the column is simple: to answer readers’ most vexing questions. Some of our favorites: “Why Is Moonshine Against the Law? You can make your own wine and beer, can’t you?“; “Did Pirates Really Say “Arrrr”? The origin of Hollywood’s high-seas slang.“; and “Tiger Woods’ car crash caused $200 worth of damage to a tree. How do you measure that?”

Slate just revealed its Explainer 2009 Question of the Year — and it asks a pretty fascinating legal question:

How would the law punish Siamese twins if one of the twins committed murder without the other being involved?

Yeah, that’s a pretty fascinating question. Perhaps equally fascinating is Slate’s rather eerie answer:

No one knows.

Explains Explainer:

There isn’t much case law to work with on this question, since in the United States, at least, conjoined twins represent something like 0.0005 percent of all live births-with an even smaller number surviving into adulthood. The conjoined twins who aren’t separated at birth and do manage to grow up have so far tended to be more or less exemplary citizens.

That said, what do courts do if and when confronted by conjoined criminals?

Only one case mentioned by Slate even got to the punishment stage. And in that case, one involving conjoined twins and a car accident, the twins were ultimately freed, apparently on the grounds that incarcerating the innocent would be unjust.

Explainer does its research, though, and comes up with a host of provocative potential solutions, including forced separation and an incarceration, after the term of which the innocent twin would be compensated financially, as if he’d been wrongly convicted.

Of course, explains the column:

All of the above assumes that one twin is unambiguously guilty, and the other is unambiguously innocent. In real life, it’s hard to imagine such a clear-cut case. For example, a jury might be inclined to believe that the “good” twin acted as an accomplice, or perhaps an accessory, to the crime after the fact. This charge would apply if one sibling knew that the other had committed a crime-which seems likely under any circumstances-and that he intentionally provided assistance or comfort to his sibling rather than calling the police at the first opportunity.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on January 07, 2010 (boomark / email).