The Crown v Godfrey

The Speech of Viscount Coddington,

Having been convicted by the jury for the crime of grievous bodily assault, it now falls upon me to sentence the prisoner. Now it was conceded by the Crown that this crime did not fall into the worst category. To briefly repeat the facts, the prisoner was approached in the street by the victim who was collecting for charity at the time. The victim had smiled and waved at him and asked how he was going. Her demeanour was so cheerful and forward that the prisoner thought that he must have known her though he was not sure how. In his embarrassment, the prisoner struck her in the mouth and then kicked her in the stomach. He then dragged her unconscious body into the middle of the road and encouraged people to run over her.

It happens that the prisoner has a siamese twin named Reginald conjoined to his back. Counsel for the prisoner submitted that a non-custodial sentence would be appropriate because it would be unfair to punish Reginald for the crimes of his brother. Otherwise it would be, Counsel suggested, to send an innocent man to gaol. However, this is mere semantics. At any rate, it was revealed by the Crown that Reginald had gauged out one of the victim's eyes during the fraccas and would have also been charged with assault had he not been given immunity for having testified against the prisoner.

Counsel for the prisoner asked me to consider that the situation of the prisoner and his siamese twin is an especially unique one. Medical evidence adduced at the trial described their rare condition of conjoinment as rectovulnerabilis. Reginald weighs 25 kilograms and is connected to the back of the prisoner by his neck. His tiny legs cannot reach the ground so he must sit on a elevated wheelchair which the prisoner is obliged to push. Without the wheelchair, his body hangs limply from the middle back of the prisoner like an African woman's swollen tit. The other peculiar aspect of Reginald's physiology is that he is unable to wear any pants because his sphincter is infected with a severe case of eczema. That being the case, people often confuse his person for just a hideously deformed anus growing from the back of a criminal, only recognising its humanity when he twists his ugly head around to face them. (Although having engaged the young man in the witness box, I must confess that I could not but stare at the angry red orifice in front of me and think that it was to the dirty gash alone that I was communicating).

It was submitted that, if Reginald were to go to gaol, he would be treated as a "piece of arse on wheels". I accept this submission. There would be a frenzy of unconsensual bum-love as he is wheeled from cell to cell like the laundry trolley and the prisoners take their fill. Counsel also reminded us that the prisoner and Reginald share the same nervous system such that a violent anal intrusion perpetrated against Reginald would be felt doubly by the prisoner. Counsel invited me to test this and, indeed, I was able to bring the prisoner to tears and induce him to foam from the mouth simply by inserting only one sharpened pencil into his brother. Of course, there is also the probabilty that the propquinity of the twins' honey pots will make them both the daily target of, in prison parlance, the menage a neuf.

Notwithstanding the force of these submissions, I feel that for the safety of the community and as a deterrent to other siamese criminals in the community, the prisoner must be sentenced to a term of 18 years.