“I’m here to confess to a crime I committed that he was wrongly accused of,” Karl Smith, 38, told a Chicago judge last week, as his identical twin, Kevin Dugar, dabbed tears from his eyes from his heavily guarded seat in the courtroom, The New York Post reports. Smith was recently denied an appeal for his 99-year prison sentence as one of four participants in a 2008 home-invasion robbery, in which two people, including a six-year-old boy, were shot but survived.  Home Daily News Identical twin testifies he committed murder… 
 
 Criminal Justice 
 
 Identical twin testifies he committed murder and brother was wrongly convicted 
 
 A prosecutor in Chicago on Thursday questioned the claim of an identical twin who testified he committed a murder and his brother was wrongly convicted of the crime in 2005. “He’s got nothing to lose,” a sceptical Assistant State’s Attorney Carol Rogala told a judge on Thursday, as the two brothers sat in court, identical in appearance but for their differently coloured prison uniforms. But if the judge decides in the twins’ favour, Dugar would be given a new trial in the 2003 murder, in which a man died and a woman was injured after a gunman fired into a small crowd of gangsters on a North Side Chicago intersection.
– Karl Smith took the witness stand last week in Illinois and dropped a bomb on a Cook County courtroom as the twin brother he hadn't seen in years looked on: "I'm here to confess to a crime I committed that he was wrongly accused of," Smith said. The part of the story that makes it especially dicey, reports the Chicago Tribune, is that Smith's identical twin, Kevin Dugar, has been jailed for the murder of a rival gang member since 2003. (The brothers have different last names because Smith adopted his mother's maiden name.) Authorities are skeptical, however. They say Smith is falsely confessing because he has exhausted his own appeal of a 99-year sentence for a 2008 home invasion and figures he may as well take the fall for his bother. Smith's "got nothing to lose," an assistant state's attorney says, adding that the confession doesn't mesh with eyewitness accounts. Smith, though, says he let his brother sit in prison because "I didn't have the strength to come forward" and because "I thought it was the job of the police to catch me." He contends that he decided to come forward after a religious conversion. A judge will decide if Dugar will get a new trial. Says Smith's mother: "He wouldn't lie about that." The bizarre nature of the case is drawing widespread attention, with coverage in the American Bar Association's ABA Journal and oversesa outlets including ITV News ("shocking") Australia's Perth Now ("stunning"). (In France, authorities struggled to figure out which twin was a rapist.)