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 citizens residing in North Carolina, where they owned land, married separate women, and together fathered more than twenty children. They were arrested on one occasion following a physical confrontation with a physician who had attempted to examine them without consent, but prosecutors dropped the case without recorded explanation. The rationale is not difficult to reconstruct. Any sentence imposed upon Chang would have fallen with equal force upon Eng, who had participated in no altercation and sought no part in it.
A comparable situation arose in 1925, when a Filipino pair, Lucio and Simplicio Godina, appeared in the press. Lucio had learned to drive, an unusual circumstance in itself, and was arrested in Manila after his vehicle collided with a carabao cart. Simplicio advanced a single and unanswerable defence: he was an innocent man and could not lawfully be imprisoned for conduct attributable to his brother. The presiding judge accepted the argument and dismissed the case. Four years later, the New York Times reported that the same brothers had evaded punishment in Los Angeles on identical reasoning. Across three cases separated by four centuries, the law arrived repeatedly at the same disposition, electing to avoid the question rather than resolve it.
The reason no court has issued a definitive ruling is not that the question is intractable but that the honest answer is uncomfortable. Whatever philosophical vocabulary is applied to it, criminal punishment is at its foundation a physical undertaking. It is rationalised through the language of rehabilitation, deterrence, and retribution, but what a court does when it punishes an offender is take custody of the body and confine it against the person's will. The individual is placed in a cell, movement is restricted, and the sanction is delivered to the body rather than to any abstract conception of guilt. That model functions coherently so long as a single mind occupies a single body, and it disintegrates the moment that condition no longer holds.
When a conjoined twin commits an offence, one body cannot be confined while the other is left at liberty, because there is only one body to imprison. The guilty twin serves the sentence, and the innocent twin serves precisely the same sentence for a crime neither committed nor could have prevented. This constitutes neither rehabilitation nor deterrence in any meaningful sense, and it is difficult to characterise as justice when one of the two persons subjected to punishment is innocent by universal acknowledgement. The Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution expressly prohibits cruel and unusual punishment, and most legal systems maintain some equivalent protection. The incarceration of an innocent person for a period of years on account of a sibling's conduct approaches a textbook illustration of the precise harm such provisions were enacted to prevent.
The alternative is equally difficult to sustain. To release the guilty twin in order to spare the innocent one is, in effect, to establish a category of persons who cannot be imprisoned for any offence short of a capital crime, through no choice or fault of their own. Scholars who have examined the question, including Colleen Davis in a 2017 article in the Criminal Law Journal and contributions appearing in the University of Cincinnati Law Review, have generally concluded that conviction should remain available while the sanction shifts to a non-custodial form such as fines, probation, or electronic monitoring. This approach preserves a measure of accountability without physically restraining an innocent party, and it is likely the most reasonable solution presently available. It nonetheless fails for serious offences. Probation for armed robbery or a monetary penalty for a violent assault does not correspond to the gravity of the crime, and the disproportion arises not from anything the offender did but purely from their biology.
What the historical record makes apparent is that the dismissals in the Colloredo, Bunker, and Godina cases were not incidental. Each time the question approached the threshold at which a court would have been required to articulate a governing principle, the legal system located a means of closing the file, and this consistent pattern of avoidance is itself instructive. Were a court to hold expressly that an innocent conjoined twin cannot be imprisoned alongside a guilty one, it would be compelled to accept the corollary that the guilty twin cannot receive a custodial sentence at all. To issue such a ruling would be to concede, in explicit terms, that the entire theory of imprisonment presupposes a single mind within a single body, and that the system has no genuine answer when that presupposition fails. That is a concession courts have never shown any willingness to make.
Disclaimer: The Civic Lens is purely analytical commentary, not legal advice.
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