The Civic Lens

On the night of 23 May 1987, a twenty-three-year-old Canadian named Kenneth Parks rose from the couch on which he had fallen asleep before the television, put on his coat, and drove fourteen miles across Toronto to the residence of his in-laws. Once inside, he strangled his father-in-law into unconsciousness and beat his mother-in-law to death with a tire iron, subsequently stabbing them both with a kitchen knife. He then presented himself at a police station and reported that he believed he had killed several people, apparently unaware that he had severed the tendons in both of his hands during the assault and was bleeding profusely. At trial, five expert witnesses testified that Parks had been sleepwalking throughout the entire episode, and in 1988 the jury acquitted him of murder. The Supreme Court of Canada upheld that acquittal in 1992, and Parks was released, having never disputed that his body had committed the killing. The verdict appears indefensible until it is considered ag...

In the seventeenth century, a pair of Italian conjoined twins named Lazarus and Joannes Baptista Colloredo travelled across Europe as entertainers. Lazarus was the dominant twin, while Joannes remained chest-bound and largely undeveloped, exercising no independent control over their shared body. According to most historical accounts, Lazarus killed a man who had publicly mocked them, and the courts declined to execute him for the act. The decision had nothing to do with his guilt. To execute Lazarus would have required executing Joannes, who had committed no offence, and so both men were spared. Four centuries later, the law has still not produced a satisfactory answer to the problem that case first exposed. The Colloredo matter was the earliest documented instance of criminal law failing in the presence of conjoined twins, and it would not be the last. By the mid-nineteenth century, Chang and Eng Bunker, the twins whose condition gave rise to the term Siamese twins, were American citi...