Like Joker’s a terrorist who’s routinely causes mayhem and countless deaths in gotham, Lex Luthor’s done everything he can to kill Superman no matter who gets killed or hurt, especially civilians, and all the other supervillains who either help them or go on to do their own horrendous crimes. So, why have none of them ever been given the death penalty, but just go to the “standard’ super-villain prison with seemingly a chance to get out from either serving their sentence, good behavior, or busting out either by themselves or with help form outside.
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Insanity plea/money/bureaucracy(we’ll kill them eventually)
Insanity plea. They never go to actual prison in many cases. People like Lex Luthor can afford lawyers that could clear Hitler of being involved in the Holocaust. And finally you have actual gods and aliens, they obviously would not be prosecuted because we can’t punish them and after waking up from being knocked out very easily can escape to home planet/dimension.
It takes time to put someone to death. They are also allowed appeals.
People can be on death row for years. And in universe it’s only been a dozen or so years max.
Joker and many other Gotham villains are pretty much always sent off to Arkham Asylum as they are insane. Emphasis on the “asylum” as it is not technically a prison even if it is one essentially.
Lex is a billionaire. Try getting him send off to a regular prison, much less make sure that he gets death penalty.
For Lex, he has ridiculously good public relations. Remember, he is tied as both the richest and smartest person on earth. His company has entire departments of people whose job it is to spin whatever happens.
Giant Lexcorp robot is trying to kill Superman? “We at Lexcorp are deeply saddened by this autonomous defense droids unexplained malfunction. Luckily, we were able to remotely detonate it while it was holding onto Superman, ending its actions once and for all. You’re welcome, Metropolis.”
Killed dozens of people in Infinity Inc.? “We thank the many people who came forward to be given powers by Lexcorp, and would like to remind the families of those involved that they accepted all possible outcomes for their involvement, agreeing to not hold Lexcorp or any associated party accountable.”
When shit gets bad? He’s got deep connections to the military, who will not let their only reliable source of weapons that can battle DC aliens got to death row.
And if shit gets REAL bad? He clones himself, transfers his brain, and claims all the bad shit was done by an imposter.
Lex also has a talent for choosing exactly the right time to do something heroic, and making sure nobody forgets about it. An earthquake has ravaged Gotham and the US government has written it off? Lex steps in to give the people food, medicine, clothing, anything they need. An unkillable monster is destroying Metropolis and killing Superman? Lex armors up to fight the thing. An omnipotent dark god is about to extinguish all life in the multiverse, starting with the Justice League? Guess who shows up to save then, piloting the Legion of Doom headquarters, with everything they need to save the day?
Leave aside real world solutions like the death penalty.
You can legit brainwash mass murderers into being decent people with psionics or magic. I am not sure if it’s right but if I could I probably would.
Cities like Gotham are typically in states without the death penalty
Skipping pass the legal explanation there are pragmatic to keep them around because think about it is a comic setting where world ending threat or multiversal crisis happen all the damn time.
And once those roll around the villain if they want to keep living will pull their weight in aiding the hero to save the world.
So looking at the bigger picture it seem useful to keep them around as a necessary evil.
Take people like Lex Luther for example he an evil piece of shit who is also constantly trying to kill the world best hero, but he is also a super genius who if motivated enough to help out can turn the tide of battle for the fate of the world we seen this time and time again in the comic.
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There is.
>Don’t you realize death is no object to most of the enemies we deal with? Quite frankly as an alternative to some of the super-punishments we’ve devised over the years–execution is a walk in the park. These “no-nonsense” solutions of yours just don’t hold water in a complex world of jet-powered apes and time travel.
Superman and Batman live in a world where life after death is an objectively verified reality, a place that the most dangerous malefactors can and do come back from. The Joker has actually been formally executed once. You can guess what happened next. They were just lucky he didn’t come back with electric superpowers .
The perception of how often Joker causes trouble is greatly exaggerated by us perceiving all versions of him simultaneously from our Doylist perspective.
If you try to build a remotely reasonable canon timeline, there can’t have been much more than around a dozen Joker incidents after the majority of which he disappeared or was presumed dead. That he wasn’t given the death penalty when he was held captive long enough to be sentenced (3-5 times?) can be explained by Gotham being in New Jersey, which does not have the death penalty as an option, what fiction plays as “insanity defence” (even though it works quite differently in real life), etc.
It’s actually far wilder that no SWAT Sniper or similar ever got a clear shot on Joker and decided to take it. What with him being pretty much a domestic terrorist, you think that’d happen sooner or later.
Remember, they generally aren’t let out of prison.
Maybe they are getting the death penalty. But the average time from being sentenced to death to being executed is 15 year – there’s a lot of legal barriers to executing people.
Few supervillains stay imprisoned for 15 years.
It’s the same reason Trump is still walking around.
Because they are valuable IP properties which make their companies a lot of money.
Any world or society approaching the real world would be executing villains expeditiously. I dunno what Joker’s kill count is now, but in no way would his reign of terror be allowed to repeat time and time again.
For those harder to kill, someone like Amanda Waller or Bolivar Trask would be empowered to find ways to end problematic powered individuals.
They’re wealthy and have connections to people in power.
Most of them aren’t caught by police. The X-men, for example, are just as hated by the police as someone like Sabretooth is.
Most of the places where they act don’t have the death penalty. Not a lot of supervillains targeting Texas or Utah for their cutting edge Christian science labs. In the places with the death penalty corruption is even more rampant, and folks like Hatemonger aren’t brought down by the law, they’re given cushy state jobs.