It’s Camazotzian ice cream. It tastes like whatever you want it to taste like.
The goons tried to use blackmail and force against a virtual demigod and his loved one: these are clearly not the actions of entirely rational human beings—these were the actions of complete fools at best, or madmen and fanatics at worst.
Therefore, I don’t find it surprising in the least that they ended up injured or killed—they obviously grievously wounded themselves trying to attack Bob, like if some headcase had tried to beat a solid bronze statue to “death,” and succeeded only in shattering every bone in their arms.
Obviously, a public health matter, not a criminal one. I might suggest, in lieu of prison, that they might benefit more from nice, safe, padded cells, and a relaxing daily pharmaceutical cocktail to prevent them from posing a danger to themselves or others through their actions or nonsensical ramblings, until they are fit for release or die of old age and chainsores. Whichever comes first.
Anybody want to give the cliff-notes version?
Member of crime family threatens to have his henchmen rape and murder a man’s daughter if he does not break the criminal’s family out of prison. Man instead kills person making the threat, roughs up the henchmen who went along with the plan and rescues his daughter.
Bob X, who has Superman’s powers, no weaknesses, and a kid in college, learns that said kid has been kidnapped by a mobster who threatens to kill her if Bob doesn’t do his bidding. Following the old advice about Danes and Danegeld, Bob kills the mobster on the spot, retrieves his daughter, and beats the shit out of everyone involved. The hypothetical “you” is a prosecutor who must decide whether to try indicting Bob despite the obvious problems that (@) he was doing what any parent would be inclined to do, only with heat vision, and (£} he’s a demigod and probably in a bad mood right now.
Seems like a clear defense-of-others case, so no, don’t prosecute.
The rules for defense of another are generally the same as for self-defense. He certainly doesn’t get prosecuted for his killing of Jimmy, who was threatening the life of his daughter, because he’s entitled to use force, even deadly force, to stop his target from the murder of another.
I don’t prosecute him for Vinnie’s injuries, because they happened outside Cook County.
The injuries inflicted on henchmen inside Cook County’s boundaries are prosecutable. I’d let a grand jury answer the question of whether he should be indicted, but if the grand jury indicted him, I’d prosecute, to the extent he’d let me.
While I agree with Bricker on the details, I’d decline to prosecute for the injuries to the henchmen. Prosecutorial discretion.
My problem with your and Bricker’s position is that Bob ain’t a regular dude. He’s not even Spider-Man. He’s a nigh-invulnerable superstrong hypersonic-flying demigod who can set you on fire by looking at you. So on the one hand, it’s hard to imagine that he couldn’t have found a way to play along with Jimmy’s plan till he could rescue Lynn. Doesn’t the fact that he had so many other options make the defense-of-family defense arguable,
On the other hand hand … I’m a dad. Bob was showing frankly inhuman restraint in giving Jimmy a single warning, not to mention not outright killing Vinnie. Because if I were alone with a guy who had held a gun to my child, wife, stepdaughter, or little sister’s head, and presumably also beat and gagged her, I’d be inclined to kill him on the spot. I think most men would. Probably most women.
Isn’t the whole point of civilization that we stop and say “Despite my burning desire to to do bodily harm to these people, I will refrain from taking personal vengeance and allow this matter to be tried in the courts”?
Being super-powered doesn’t exempt you from that. Neither does being a father. I understand where he’s coming from, and nobody is saying we treat him a like a cold-blooded, pre-meditated killer… but the the guy *did *cross the line.
No.
Bob wasn’t justified (like the hypo said, he didn’t have to kill [del]The MotherFucker[/del]“Jimmy”, just grabbing him at superspeed and dropping him and catching him, from a mile high, repeatedly, should get the job done),
but there’s no point prosecuting.
Yes, but what fun is that?
Work out a plea bargain. Bob pleads guilty to misdemeanor simple assault. Two years suspended sentence, eighty hours community service picking up trash and dead dinosaurs in the local parks, and a stern talking-to. If he stays out of trouble, and/or saves the world for a year, then expunge the conviction.
You did say ice cream, didn’t you?
Regards,
Shodan
For Great Justice
Bob does that, he is validating Jimmy’s belief that he, Bob, is not willing to kill him.
Now Jimmy is clearly an idiot who has based his plan on reading Action Comics and homophobia rather than news reports, 'cause otherwise he’d know that Bob let half of Tehran get gobbled by a dragon rather than risk letting his kid get shot. But that doesn’t mean he’s chickenshit enough to fall for an obvious bluff. I wouldn’t bet my kid’s life on it.
I think Randy Milholland pretty much nailed this dilemma in a 2-parter Super Stupor (I linked the second of the two because the first is a little bit vulgarly NSFW). If you have a being who could, at any time, violate any law (including several laws of nature), but chooses to obey them as a moral choice, then you don’t tweak that particular tiger’s tail.
Also, because we know that this character has virtually unlimited powers AND that he chose this particular resolution, we have to believe that this was the scenario with the highest probability of a successful outcome. This includes a) saving the girl and b) making sure that no smarter criminal tries the same stunt, but without the face to face chat. Because this being is potentially an incredibly powerful weapon if coerced, an equivalently powerful deterrent has to be in place to make sure no one can wield it.
Only if you ignore centuries of evidence that it won’t.
Barq’s please ------- I’m running low on my free Soviet stuff.
You don’t pull on Leviathan’s cape, sonny.
Bob X is, in a sense, a whole society: He is a force as powerful as a nuclear-capable nation, who obeys certain rules out of a desire to live in a society governed by laws which respects basic human rights. He won’t put a bank robber into a high orbit because society wants bank robbers to be imprisoned for fixed terms; additionally, killing robbers is impossible to justify under the moral laws most people obey unless the robbers cross a line into homicide or a very immediate threat of homicide.
That is a two-way street. If someone figures out a way to use Bob X’s powers for their own selfish ends, that’s equivalent to someone figuring out how to steal, arm, target, and launch an ICBM. Maybe even a whole lot of ICBMs. It’s a pure existential threat; if it isn’t countered in the strongest possible way, there won’t be a society left to protect. Therefore, killing the person who tries it is the only moral solution.
The justification for deadly force seems extremely tenuous to me. Bob has to contend that because someone evil in an unknown location is holding a gun to his daughter’s head, he was justified in killing that person’s boss, even though killing the boss did nothing to change the fact that someone evil in an unknown location is holding a gun to his daughter’s head. Killing person A may be effective to show person B that you are capable of killing, but I don’t see how that constitutes a legal defense; indeed, it’s classic gang behavior.
Well, I doubt forming a defense strategy was anywhere on Bob’s mind. Uppermost on his mind was saving his kid right then; second was preventing a recurrence of the hostage situation. Thus he had to convince Vinnie that doing the slightest harm to Lynn would be the worst mistake since Pandora opened the box, and the best way to do that was to (€) make sure Vinnie wasn’t getting paid, and (∆) slow-roast Jimmy on the live feed.