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Plus, it's entirely possible for Spider-Man to tie up a criminal with webbing, then call the police and say "Hey, it's Spidey. I've got a bank robber tied up at $address, could you come and arrest him so he can be tried for his crime before a jury in a court of law?"
The Joker gives more than enough evidence of his involvement even without the Bat contamining crime scenes. He freaking announces his crimes in live TV, for Pete's sake. You can't get much more obvious than that. The same goes for whatever time Two-Face or Poison Ivy break into a gala, start killing people, and kidnap the major before everyone else left. Building cases and gathering damning evidence against Gotham's Rogues isn't exactly hard.
A notable exception would be the Modern Age Penguin, who is clever and sane enough to cover his tracks and keep his hands unstained by the time any police inquiry comes along. He HAS used that to taunt Batman about how he can't lock him up.
edited 1st Jun '13 5:37:06 AM by NapoleonDeCheese
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You mean he hasn't done that already? Definitely sounds like him.
The problem is that after they're done killing, a guy dressed like a bat comes along and contaminates the crime scene. Eye witness accounts alone are not enough to condemn a man to death. Flashy public confessions could've been done by actors. In reality, cases are weak without reliable forensic evidence, which is ruined the moment the batarangs start flying. If anything, they should arrest him as well, on charges of obstruction of justice.
The same also applies to Lex Luthor, by the way. When you have a Flying Brick making a mess of any crime scene, and not able to testify in court, it's kinda hard to pin down anything on Luthor. All in all, this goes to show that while superheroes are extremely effective in dealing with petty thugs and superpowered threats, actual career criminals easily elude them due to their own less than legal methods. There's plenty of horrible crime in the world, that isn't a job for Superman. So... enter The Punisher.
edited 1st Jun '13 7:09:19 AM by indiana404
How does Batman's presence contaminate the crime scene more than anyone else's presence? Let's say I'm in the lobby of a movie theatre and I assault someone; if someone else in the lobby pulls me away from the guy I was attacking, aren't they now contaminating the crime scene, too?
P.S. There's technology that lets you take two recordings of someone's voice and confirm that they come from the same person, like vocal fingerprinting, so passing off the Joker's public confessions as the work of an actor isn't gonna cut it. And while one person's eyewitness testimony may not be worth much, hundreds of people's eyewitness testimony is.
edited 1st Jun '13 10:46:20 AM by RavenWilder
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The difference is that the guy would be able to testify in court on his own accord; the Bat tends to get shy whenever it comes to that. "Saved by an anonymous benefactor" just leaves far too many questions to be taken as is. As for technology, around guys like Clayface who can imitate whoever they want, voice recognition isn't as reliable. And as
noted, actual direct witnesses to the Joker's crimes tend to be few and far between... and short-lived as well.
It's a good thing that the Joker freely admits he commits acts of terrorism and murder and would probably be perfectly willing to do so on the bench or convicting him might be hard.
The Joker should be piss easy to convict. The only problem is that in the D Cverse Insanity is an impenetrable legal defense apparently.
"War without fire is like sausages without mustard." - Jean Juvénal des Ursins
Yeah, there's that. I really feel they're pushing it too hard, just to have the clown kicking. I mean, if you can have a Spider-Man comic after killing off the Green Goblin, or even Peter Parker himself, you can certainly have a Batman comic after doing away with the pale psychopath, at least for a decade or so. Also, a post-Joker Bruce Wayne would be pretty interesting to observe, if Batman Beyond is any indication.
edited 1st Jun '13 1:04:24 PM by indiana404
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What if the guy who stopped me from beating up that other guy fled the scene before the police arrived? There'd still be tons of witnesses to what I did, possibly security camera footage of the act, and my fingerprints and DNA all over the assault victim. What's it matter if that one guy testifies?
And if we're gonna bring superhuman powers into the courtroom, even DNA evidence isn't enough to convict someone: the Joker could claim all his crimes were committed by an evil clone or Alternate Universe version of himself.
And really, in an universe where they could keep the Joker jailed, it shouldn't be that hard getting some of his henchmen to cooperate with the police. "Do you want this guy to walk out free on lack of evidence? Remember he's crazy as hell, so he won't bother to learn if you ratted him out or not. Your best chance of living is helping us to keep him locked up!"
Even in the real world, DNA evidence is shaky and unreliable. Nobody builds their case around DNA because DNA is a very rough imprint. "We can confirm that the crime was committed by somebody in this general genetic area, so probably some part of this or that extended family or loosely-affiliated relative thereof." That's about as precise as DNA gets. It can help to support a case against the suspect, but it will not get you a conviction if you don't have anything better to offer.
And to answer how anyone being at the crime scene doesn't contaminate it: it actually does. That's why police cordon off the crime scene and allow nobody, not a reporter, not a vigilante, nobody who is not a law enforcement official to enter the scene until they are done. Just walking onto the crime scene to chat up Jim Gordon contaminates it.
The key phrase here is "reasonable doubt". A man cannot be convicted if there is reasonable doubt of his guilt. Even if everyone saw the Joker kill the Mayor, if there is even the smallest chance that he was someone else wearing Joker makeup, the Joker cannot be convicted. If a chance exists that the evidence condemning the Joker was fabricated, the Joker cannot be convicted. If a chance exists that the man who shot the mayor and the man who was left crumbled in a pile outside the police station with a sign that says, "Arrest this one," were two separate men, the Joker cannot be convicted.
If Batman can actually take down the Joker in the act of committing the crime that's a different story; but how often does that occur, in which the Joker is taken down in full view of the police trying to arrest him? And how often does he escape, lead Batman on a wild chase across Gotham, and then only get taken down while in the safety of his own base of operations, several miles away with nothing to connect him to the original crime that hasn't been contaminated by Batman pocketing it?
Sure, you might say there would be evidence at the base, but it's all inadmissable because Batman was there first. Even a kid fresh out of law school could present a defense regarding the time it took for the police to arrive, in which Batman was alone with the crime scene. He doesn't have to prove that happened. He doesn't need to prove the Joker's innocence at all; the Joker is innocent until proven guilty. He only needs to prove that a possibility exists in which Batman may have set it all up, and the Joker walks away a free man.
edited 1st Jun '13 3:51:34 PM by TobiasDrake
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.When you have the Joker, who won't ever deny his crimes, plus witnesses, plus audio evidence, plus the public opinion's weight (far weaker cases have paid off before because of public and politic pressure), plus other likely factors, all put together, walking away on technicalities becomes harder. With just some of those factors in, sure, which is why I mentioned Penguin as a good example of escaping conviction through vigilantism loopholes, but people like Joker just pushes it too far.
Some incarnations of Batman, like the Silver Age's (and even up into the Bronze Age until Englehart's run, where he's outlawed by Thorne) have Batman somehow with public recognition as an oficial law enforcement agent (because comics), too.
Plus, with many crime scenes Batman visits, the official policy is 'Batman was never here, don't be ridiculous' even adding 'Batman is an urban myth, he couldn't have ever been here to begin with' at some stages of the character's career. Just proving Batman was ever there contaminating the scene is a hard task for a lawyer, since not only Batman is very careful while there, but neither Gordon nor his men are ever admitting Batman was ever there.
edited 1st Jun '13 4:00:30 PM by NapoleonDeCheese
Well, yeah, I'm mostly using the Joker as a metaphor here. The actual Joker would plead guilty and the case would be over before it even got off the ground, unless he thought it would be more amusing to try and defend his innocence; and even then, he'd probably elect to represent himself because he's that kind of narcissist, and that never works out in your favor.
That's a scandal waiting to happen, regarding Batman never being there. That only works until someone actually manages to get definitive proof; then it call every criminal ever tried since Batman first began being rumored to appear into question. You're looking at retrials on practically a complete city-wide scale for hundreds of inmates, not to mention discrediting the entire Gotham City Police Department, probably with massive terminations and huge penalties for those not eliminated once the government steps in to clean up the mess, with hundreds of criminals walking free because the possible involvement in a masked vigilante in...basically every case, regardless of whether or not he was actually involved, has rendered their convictions questionable.
The moment anyone has proof the police department is working with Batman, everything gets worse than it was before he ever began. Best case scenario, Jim Gordon steps forward and takes a bullet by claiming it was all on him and the rest of the police never had anything to do with the Batman, which only discredits those cases he was involved in, but guarantees that he will never work in law enforcement again for the rest of his natural life.
EDIT: And that's assuming the police's insistence that they don't have a Batman actually means anything; the moment a criminal testifies that he got taken down by the Batman, the investigation is on. Don't assume they would just blow it off because it sounds ridiculous; people investigate shit like this all the time. At the very least, they would actually have to do so in order to present a case in a court to begin with, because the defendant's case depends on it.
Police in the real world have spent hours combing a highway for a vampire because a woman claimed she crashed into a tree after being attacked by a vampire. No matter how ridiculous your claim is, the police will investigate it, so unless the entire GCPD is in Batman's pocket, there will still be serious cops looking into it. And even if there aren't, there will be news reporters desperate for a story, attorneys looking to build their case, and just random civilians out to make a name for themselves by proving that the Batman exists.
And the second any of these people manages to find a hint of a case involving the words, "Scandal: Gotham City Police Department working with Vigilante?!" the news media will descend upon the police department like a pack of rabid hounds.
edited 1st Jun '13 4:24:15 PM by TobiasDrake
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.It's reasonable doubt, not any doubt. If I'm accused of a crime, I could claim it was committed by my long lost identical twin, whose existence was kept off the records when we were born. That's theoretically possible, meaning there is some doubt about whether I committed the crime, but it's too improbable to earn me an acquittal.
And I'm still not getting a clear answer about something. For crimes like assault and murder to occur, there have to be at least two people present at the crime scene: the criminal and the victim. So let's say I go on a shooting spree at a supermarket: I kill four people and wound twelve, while twenty people escape from the supermarket unharmed, and another nine rush in from the parking lot to see what's going on. That's 44 people who were present at the crime scene, contaminating the evidence. By your logic, as long as I'm not still firing the gun when the police show up, I'll go free because all those victims and bystanders compromised the evidence. I'm pretty sure that's not how it would work in real life.
edited 1st Jun '13 4:32:49 PM by RavenWilder
Why must you Straw Man? Police race to set up the crime scene as soon as they possibly can to avoid crime scene tampering and shoo as many boots as they can off the scene. The bystanders don't compromise the evidence by being in the same room as it. They do, however, certainly compromise it if they pick it up and walk off the scene of the crime with it, as Batman frequently does. And once the perimeter is set up, nobody is allowed in.
EDIT: And if you had a birth certificate or any other evidence of the existence of your identical twin, which a lawyer would prepare ahead of time if he was going to present that as your defense in the courtroom, you could actually present a case on that. No, you cannot just spout random things and try to get an acquittal, but a legal defense has been mounted - and even won - on shakier grounds. Look at O.J. Simpson.
edited 1st Jun '13 4:40:22 PM by TobiasDrake
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.Ah.
I like this discussion.
From it, I gather that Batman wants the Joker to live and keep committing crimes.
If you want any of my avatars, just Pm me I'd truly appreciate any avatar of a reptile sleeping in a Nice Hat Read Elmer Kelton booksWhat about the people who were shot? They're presumably rushed to the hospital right away, even if they still have bullets from the shooter's gun in their body. And when there's someone shooting up the place, you gotta expect that some people will high-tail it out of there as quick as they can without waiting for the police to turn up, maybe carrying their purchases with them, which would count as evidence. What makes those people less of a threat to the crime scene's integrity than Batman?
edited 1st Jun '13 4:47:43 PM by RavenWilder
...how, exactly, would a $4,000 purse that a customer bought at Macey's just before the shooting be evidence for anything?
Also, a bullet can be traced back to the gun that fired it, and hospitals are government offices that heavily document everything that comes and goes. The bullet that's brought into the hospital inside the body of a victim is removed from the victim and placed in a sealed bag. The police can pick up that sealed bag and store it with the rest of the evidence. This is standard procedure, and that's assuming there isn't enough evidence back at the crime scene to link the killer to the shootings already. If you shot 44 people, and there's evidence to prove that a single shooter was responsible for the shootings, they only need to prove you shot one of them; because they've already proven that the same person shot all 44.
Why are you assuming an absolute 1 or 0, every single thing in the crime scene has to be absolutely flawless? You're creating a False Dichotomy where either ALL OF THE EVIDENCE IS PERFECT or THE ENTIRE THING HAS TO BE THROWN OUT.
edited 1st Jun '13 4:58:13 PM by TobiasDrake
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.My point is that, in my scenario, some people heard the shooting, rushed into the supermarket to see what was happening, and then ran away to safety, fleeing the crime scene. What does it matter if one of them was wearing a bat costume and threw a bat-shaped boomerang at the shooter's head before leaving?
edited 1st Jun '13 5:07:29 PM by RavenWilder
It doesn't. What matters is if he stuck around, picked up some bullet casings and a cartridge you emptied and ejected during the shootings, then left the scene, went back to his Batcave, and analyzes the casings and cartridge in order to find you.
Those casings and cartridge are now inadmissable as evidence because he stole them from the scene of the crime. This does not invalidate the entire crime scene, no. It does, however, invalidate potentially critical evidence for identifying the shooter.
edited 1st Jun '13 5:09:51 PM by TobiasDrake
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.The casings might not, but if that cartridge is the only one abandoned during the shootout, and it's what he needed to identify the killer, then that's a huge connection piece that is now lost forever.
Or in smaller crimes. Let's say the Joker breaks into a guy's house for whatever reason and shoots him in the back of the head. One shot, one kill. Batman takes the bullet back to the Batcave, uses it to determine that the Joker killed the guy, and now this connecting piece is lost forever.
You should never assume that a single piece of evidence is trivial. That trivial piece you took could mean the difference between conviction and acquittal, no matter how small or seemingly irrelevant it may be to you at the time. Batman wouldn't have grabbed it if he didn't think it was important, but if it's important, than his tampering with it could ruin any chance of convicting the villain.
edited 1st Jun '13 5:16:59 PM by TobiasDrake
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.Arrested on sight for being an escaped fugitive, but he still needs to be tried for any crimes he commits while he's out of prison, lest he wind up serving just his original sentence for all of it.
edited 1st Jun '13 5:45:05 PM by TobiasDrake
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.

Now, just to clarify; the reason Joker keeps getting away scot-free is specifically because Batman is a vigilante, yes? Now, if Batman just stopped being Batman, stopped fighting crime, Gotham would be screwed, because, let's face it; Gotham needs Bruce Wayne. Maybe just not nesicarrly in the same way that Bruce thinks Gotham has needed him. However, If Bruce had joined the police, while still putting his vast repitore of skills to use, he could still protect Gotham, while also ensuring that any evidence found involving himself could be used in trial. BOOM, Joker gets sentenced to Life, if not Death. Plus, since Bruce is no longer dressed up like a freak-of-nature, the Joker might not find Bruce interesting, and thus not make the relation between them so personal. And with his vast amount of wealth, Bruce could also do so much more for the force.
However, that probably wouldn't make for a lasting — or even incredibly interesting — ongoing series, and so criminals like the Joker are probably going to get off lightly until Doomsday.