10 Legal Problems Superheroes Don't Like To Talk About
6. Fighting Crime Might Not Be Entirely Legal
Now, this won’t actually apply to a surprising proportion of superpowered heroes. I mean, how many do you know of in this day and age who actually still fight crime? In the Marvel Cinematic Universe, only Daredevil and Spider-Man actually stop criminals from performing everyday criminal acts. In the regular comics, the X-Men have pretty much never attempted to fight crime - like many superheroes, they’re too busy fighting supervillains for much more complicated reasons than mere criminal activity.
On the other hand, it’s always seemed as though the Batman treats his superheroic activities as a nuisance and a distraction from his real job of cleaning up Gotham City. But how do the police and judiciary in Gotham consider that due process has been served when they turn up to find criminals tied up and beaten to a pulp?
Batman can technically claim citizen’s arrest, but that requires him to only use reasonable force, something any good lawyer could argue he’s moved well beyond, with the batarangs and the ninja skills and the broken faces. He’d also have to be a witness in every criminal prosecution, which - given that he’s a masked man with a secret identity - is a whole other can of worms.
What if Batman’s witness evidence is the only evidence that can convict the perpetrator? He’s fortunate in that many of his rogue’s gallery can be declared insane, be committed to Arkham Asylum and so avoid a criminal trial - but that won’t cover the drug dealers, the human traffickers, the gang lords, etc etc.
Gotham judges may be used to fudging the law to avoid any good lawyer from claiming that the masked martial artist that beat up their client violated their constitutional rights - but what about other, less blighted cities in America?
What about extradition? Many villains are foreign nationals too, engaged in criminal activity in this country when they have no legal permission to be here - or in other countries, where the same laws don’t necessarily apply.
If the court - wherever that court might be - chooses not to prosecute the bad guys due to lack of evidence or some form of technicality (and that happens in real life far more often than you’d think, never mind in the Marvel or DC universes), then what do the heroes do then?