General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: This message was self-deleted by its author [View all]cthulu2016
(10,960 posts)If the FBI #1 most wanted is sitting on a park bench I can't walk up and shoot him.
I might not get into trouble for doing so, in practice, but the FBI's relative level of interest would not change anything legally except in terms of an argument that the FBI ranking would lead "the reasonable man" to have believed the suspect to be an imminent threat to others by merely existing.
A jury might be sympathetic to that, or not. But the argument would have to be madethere is no FBI most wanted list exception to any justifiable homicide standard I know of.
The cases of 1930s figures like Bonnie and Clyde are often extra-judicial executions, and planned as such. Ma Barker's shack was practically cut in half with machine guns like a stealth attack on a German mortar position. J. Edgar Hoover planned the deaths (not captures) of people on his list. It is hard to read the Dillinger death as anything other than a planned "hit."
No great sympathy for Dillinger or Barrow here (though Ma Barker was just an illiterate hillbilly who was surely not the head of any crime operation, but merely someone who did not opt to turn in her family... aid and comfort, which is apropos here), but the fact is the FBI did plan to execute Americans extra-judicially.
And J. Edgar Hoover's methods have not lacked for subsequent critique.