This never occurred to me before. But, well, identical twins have nearly indistinguishable DNA. Meaning that they make really, really good criminals. In Germany yesterday, two twins were acquitted from charges stemming from a multi-million euro jewel heist that one of them did. But since they can’t figure out which one did it (and the twins ain’t talking), they got to walk free. So it turns out that this has happened before: a drug-runner to be sentenced to death in Malaysia was set free because the judge couldn’t figure out which was which. I picked up this story over at boing boing, where a commenter Takuan made a rather interesting point:
getting back to establishing a clean, false identity to hold in reserve for one’s children; how about a “twin”? Not as good as a total synthetic, but better than nothing?
I’m not sure that they would get away with it in the US. What with all these pesky “aiding and abetting” laws we have floating around. Likely we’d string up both twins, one for the crime and one as an accessory. which usually carries the same penalty.