Basic Trope: A disability of some sort serves as a reason a person couldn't be guilty of a crime.
- Straight: The police suspect Bob of murder, but it turns out Bob has very poor vision. The murder took place after nightfall and Bob couldn't have seen well enough to aim the gun.
- Exaggerated: The police suspect Bob of murder, but it turns out Bob doesn't have good enough vision to have aimed the gun, that he has an allergy that would have been triggered by the pollen where the murder happened, and that he recently broke both legs and has been confined to a wheelchair.
- Downplayed: Bob has very poor vision. The victim was being loud enough that he might have been able to shoot him based on his sense of hearing; however, the location of the bullet makes it unlikely.
- Justified: Bob's disability or disabilities affect one or more parts of his body that were vital to his being able to commit the crime.
- Inverted:
- Bob has very poor vision. That means he probably wouldn't have been able to pick out all the details on the person he claims he saw commit the murder.
- The detectives deduce that the victim was beaten to death with a walking stick. Bob can walk unaided and doesn't even own a walking stick, so he's cleared of responsibility for the killing.
- Bob needs prosthetic legs to walk, so the police finds very strange that the alleged "home invasion" that led to Bob killing Jim in self-defense happened so suddenly that Bob shot Jim twenty times in a panic but not suddenly enough that Bob had enough time to put on said legs and walk to where he kept his gun.
- Bob is singled out as the only possible suspect because he has a disability - such as saliva he left behind having traces of a very specific and tightly restricted type of medicine only supplied to patients with his sickness.
- The police figures out that in order for the assilant who killed Jim to get away unseen, he had to run a quarter mile in ten seconds and leap over a six-feet-wide creek. That immediately removes Bob and 30% of the population of Lame Leg Junction, who consider it a good day when they can shuffle forward at ten inches an hour.
- Subverted: The police suspect Bob of murder and find out he's almost blind, which would seem to clear him ... but then it turns out Bob has been faking his condition for years.
- Double Subverted: ...However, it turns out he still couldn't have committed the murder because his hands have a tremor and he couldn't have aimed properly even if he could see.
- Parodied: The police suspect Bob of murder, and are on their way to arrest him when Alice points out that Bob is completely paralyzed from the neck downwards.
- Zig-Zagged: The police suspect Bob of murder. They give up on him as a suspect after finding out he's blind, but then they uncover evidence he's been faking it. However, then they discover Bob has a hand tremor, but that doesn't necessarily mean he couldn't have sent someone else to do it.
- Averted:
- Bob has no disability to clear him of guilt.
- Bob has an alibi that has nothing to do with any handicap he may have.
- Bob's disabilities are not obstructive/weakening enough to prevent him from possibly committing the murder he's being accused of.
- Enforced: The writers want to make an episode that deals with a Miscarriage of Justice brought upon by blind police zealotry — a man will be tossed in jail without considering whether or not the fact that he's got a disablity would actually allow him to perform the crime, and this is just a major dick move.
- Lampshaded: "What an embarrassment ... trying to arrest a blind guy for a shooting."
- Invoked: Charlie, the actual killer, brings Bob with him and then absconds after he's killed his victim, leaving Bob to be picked up and then ruled out by the police.
- Exploited: Bob deliberately injures himself so the police won't suspect him.
- Defied: The police suspect everyone the same regardless of the presence or absence of disability.
- Discussed: "I think suspect number three is the easiest one to rule out, because he has low vision."
- Conversed: "In every other show, the suspect with the disability turns out to have been either Obfuscating Disability or the perpetrator."
- Implied: Bob is called in for questioning, then he walks out of the police interrogation room accompanied by a guide dog.
- Played For Laughs:
- The disability is absurd, such as a crippling Absurd Phobia. It even leads to a moment in which it's demonstrated that it's Not Hyperbole — Bob does faint instantly whenever he tries to lie, so if he says he's not the killer, he's definitely not the killer.
- The police gives the whole Joe Friday treatment to a brittle-boned quadraplegic cross-eyed deaf-mute with less intelligence than Ralph Wiggum that they insist is the Cheasapeake Sniper.
- Played for Drama: Bob was Hiding the Handicap to prevent losing his job and although he's cleared of suspicion of murder, the alibi that the police discovered might leave him unemployed.
Go back to Disability Alibi
