4. What About The Law?
IconIt's a plot point whenever writers introduce a new character or have run out of other stories to tell, but it's not one that's ever really been dealt with in a satisfying manner. Again, Batman's the most frequent character who gets embroiled in conflicts between over his TOTALLY ILLEGAL vigilante maneuvers with the people whose actual job it is to protect and serve, but even when cops do go after him they're usually some by-the-book rookies who don't understand how the real world works, and that they should totally leave this nutter in a rodent costume to sort out these crimes. Even though he has no jurisdiction, isn't properly trained or supervised and - most importantly - has no legal powers at all. See there's a little thing called the due process of the law, which is the legal requirement that the state must respect all of the legal rights that are owed to a person (thanks Wikipedia). Those legal rights usually involve things like people's right to appeal against convictions, which is handy because there are a lot of examples of people being framed or just plain mistaken identity out there. These are the standards that all law officials are expected to follow, along with stuff like adhering to rules about police brutality and not setting people on fire. You know who doesn't follow any of these laws? Superheroes. Batman's like Tommy Lee Jones in The Fugitive. He doesn't care whether you did the bad thing or not, he's gonna break your ribs regardless and let the police deal with the paperwork. Which, by the way, must be totally screwed by these vigilantes bringing criminals in, since they're lacking in arrest reports and, in a lot of cases, evidence that would secure a conviction. Still, these bad guys end up in prisons, so how the heck to the police departments and attorneys for the prosecution in comic books jump through all these hoops?