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How do you legally punish half a conjoined twin?
- dandelany 17y agoYou could just tie the guilty party's hand down and throw a bag over his head for a few years... Cruel and unusual? Maybe, but less so than forced separation :)
- NikkiA 17y agoIt's a largely irrelevant question for the simple fact that IF the twins have separate brains and thus are not one entity, then the second twin is almost certainly guilty of conspiracy and/or being an accomplice to any act that twin #1 does. Thus both twins will require punishment anyway. If the second twin informs on the first, then the situation put forward in the hypothetical question can arise, but that's not very likely. There are a few situations where the crime isn't serious enough to warrant a serious punishment for being a conspirator or accomplice, but those can probably be dealt with by a more lenient form of punishment on the first twin - house arrest over prison time, etc. That would be up to the judge in such a case, and such a judge is likely to receive medical/psychological advice on sentencing in such a rare and usual case. Conjoined twins are likely to remain a rare enough occurance that we don't really need to ponder the legal issues of punishment until they're needed, and codifying them as a special case is probably not necessary.