Every Monday a villain takes the stand. The prosecution and the defence argue with real criminology, and you hand down the sentence. The verdict is published the following Monday.
Arthur Fleck planned Murray Franklin’s death and carried it out before millions of viewers. He knew what he was doing and made it a spectacle. His suffering does not cancel his capacity to choose.
A city that cut his medication, humiliated him and turned its back on him built the pressure that finally exploded. Merton called it strain: impossible goals and no legitimate path to them.
Walter White calculated every step: the business, the partners, the victims. He admits it himself at the end: he did it because he liked it and was good at it. It is rational choice in its purest form.
A brilliant teacher, humiliated by those who got rich on his work, with cancer and no money to treat it. Society denied him what it had promised, and he took another road.
Light Yagami made himself judge, jury and executioner. He killed criminals, but also innocents who stood in his way. Whoever decides who deserves to live does not do justice: he replaces it.
Light was not born a killer: a notebook gave him absolute power and society cheered him as a saviour. The label of «Kira» ended up defining him completely.
Erik Lehnsherr justifies violence against millions of innocents on the pretext of protecting his own. No injustice suffered gives the right to punish those who did not commit it.
He survived Auschwitz and watched humanity once again single out a minority. His violence comes from knowing what happens when a society decides a group is a threat.
Killmonger killed whoever he had to in order to reach the throne, including the woman who was helping him. His cause may have been just, but his method was that of the empire he claimed to fight.
He grew up in Oakland, orphaned, while Wakanda hid its wealth from the world. His rage is that of someone who compares what he has with what he was denied.
Thanos decided on his own that half the universe should die. No arithmetic justifies genocide, however much the perpetrator believes he is saving the rest.
Eren Yeager unleashed the greatest massacre in his world. He could have sought another way out and chose total destruction. Being a victim of a war gives no right to exterminate those who did not start it.
Eren grew up in a doomed town, watched his mother die and discovered that the whole world wanted to annihilate his people. His violence is the product of every system that surrounded him.
Carrie arrived at the prom after a lifetime of humiliation at home and at school. General strain theory explains how accumulated suffering ends up seeking an outlet.
The Creature killed a child and two innocent adults to take revenge on its creator. It knew it was doing harm: it says so in its own words. Revenge does not turn murder into justice.
The Creature was born without guilt, abandoned by its creator and rejected by everyone who saw it. No one taught it anything but contempt. Who is truly responsible?
Dexter Morgan kills because he needs to, not to do justice. His code is an alibi: he alone decides who deserves to die and hides the evidence from inside the police.
Dexter watched his mother being murdered at the age of three. His adoptive father channelled what he could not cure into a code that only allows killing killers. Can more be asked of someone born in a pool of blood?
Anakin Skywalker chose power over loyalty and killed with his own hands children who trusted him. Fear of losing the one he loved does not justify destroying everyone else.
Torn from his mother and his home as a child, raised by an order that forbade him to love and manipulated for years by Palpatine. His brakes failed because no one reinforced them.
Harleen Quinzel was a psychiatrist: she knew better than anyone what the Joker was doing and chose to join him. Her training aggravates her responsibility rather than reducing it.
Harley learned violence from a man who manipulated her, abused her and made her his accomplice. Her story is that of an abusive relationship, not of a criminal who chooses.
Alex DeLarge enjoyed violence: he sought it every night with his gang and celebrated it. There is no cause in his story other than his own pleasure in doing harm.
Alex was a teenager bonded to nothing: no family to supervise him, no school, no future. The state responded with brainwashing. Who punishes those who took away his capacity to choose?
Lelouch manipulated friends and enemies with a power that annulled their will, and sacrificed lives like chess pieces. A noble end does not cleanse the means.
Lelouch rose against an empire that enslaved whole peoples and took his mother from him. His violence answers the violence of an unjust system, and in the end he sacrificed himself to close the cycle.
Misa Amane killed of her own free will, sought out Kira to put herself at his service and gave up years of her life to keep killing. Her devotion does not make her a victim.
Almost five hundred years of dependence on an object that devours the will of whoever bears it. Gollum is less a criminal than the victim of an addiction no one could have resisted.
Charges: A series of murders, several of them followed by cannibalism, and the deaths of the two police officers guarding him during his escape in Memphis.
Psychopathy is not madness. Lecter understands perfectly well what is right and what is wrong, and his violence is instrumental: planned, cold, serving an end. Nothing in him slips out of control. His lack of remorse does not reduce his responsibility: it portrays a man who kills knowing exactly what he is doing.
Neuroscience finds, in profiles like Lecter’s, an amygdala that barely registers other people’s fear and pain, and a weak link with the cortex that puts a moral brake on impulses. If the empathy circuit never switches on, harm to others carries no weight inside. To judge him without looking at that brain is to judge only half the case.
The powerful almost never see the inside of a cell. Cersei held the power of the crown and used it to wipe out, in a single blow, the court that was about to try her, the High Sparrow and the Tyrells. Critical criminology asks for exactly this: that power should not grant immunity, and that whoever wields it must answer for what they do with it.
Cersei spent her life watching her twin receive the sword and the freedom denied to her, married off without a choice as the piece in an alliance. When she played the game like the men at court, the Faith paraded her naked through the streets. Feminist criminology calls it double deviance: a woman who offends is judged twice.
The urge to dominate may be as old as the species, but Homelander had everything and still kept eliminating whoever threatened his place at the top. Biology loads the impulse; whether to rein it in was his decision, time after time. The most powerful being in the world was also the one best able to restrain himself.
Homelander was raised in a laboratory as a product, with no one to love him, and learned to see threats in every glance. Kenneth Dodge explains reactive aggression this way: a reading error that turns anyone into a rival and any gesture into a challenge. His violence springs from that twisted reading, learned long before his first crime.
Charges: The murders of his father and grandparents, of James and Lily Potter and of many others, several of them to create Horcruxes, and a war to rule the wizarding world.
Harry Potter, also an orphan raised without affection, shared gifts with Tom Riddle and even carried a fragment of his soul inside him, and chose the opposite. Riddle was not doomed: every Horcrux demanded a murder decided in advance. He built his evil piece by piece and in full lucidity. Few defendants have chosen so much.
Tom Riddle grew up in an orphanage: his mother died after giving birth to him and his father had abandoned her. Before he set foot in Hogwarts he was already frightening other children and taking their things. Terrie Moffitt describes the persistent offender this way: the problem starts very early, with no bonds to hold it back, and each step feeds the next.
Charges: A series of murders with torture in 1980s Manhattan, among them that of a colleague, although the work itself leaves in doubt how many really happened.
There is no poverty here, no neighbourhood, no lack of opportunity to invoke: Bateman had everything. Looking for social causes where there are none is handing him an excuse. Right realism puts the focus where it belongs, on individual responsibility. He killed because he wanted to, methodically and unhurriedly, and that is why he must answer for it.
Bateman is the product of a world in which economic success swallowed everything else: family, friendship, morality. Messner and Rosenfeld call it institutional anomie. In his Wall Street no one looked beyond the business cards and the restaurant bookings, and even his confession was taken as a joke.
Charges: Faking her own death so that her husband would be accused of killing her, and slitting Desi Collings’s throat in order to return as the victim of a kidnapping.
Amy wrote a fake diary, planted clues and prepared every detail of her disappearance. Not one outburst, not one doubt: charm, manipulation and zero remorse, the core of psychopathy. When the plan went wrong, she killed a man who had taken her in to regain control of the story. She did not lose her nerve: she managed it.
Amy lost her job and much of her money, left New York for her husband’s home town and discovered he was cheating on her with a student. Robert Agnew explains how losing what one values and suffering what hurts produces an anger that seeks an outlet. Hers was cold, but that is where it came from.
Charges: The death of a Romani woman at the doors of Notre-Dame, the persecution of her people, the burning of Paris to find Esmeralda and the attempt to burn her at the stake.
Frollo turned cruelty into a religious duty, reduced the Romani people to a plague and blamed Esmeralda for his own desire. These are the mechanisms Bandura described for doing evil without feeling evil. Believing himself a saint does not put out a single pyre: it makes him more dangerous, because whoever believes himself righteous never makes amends.
Frollo was at war with his own desire. To him it was sin, so he repressed it and, when Esmeralda appeared, projected it onto her: it was Esmeralda who tempted him. Psychoanalysis reads crime as the symptom of an unresolved conflict between what one desires and what one forbids. His violence comes from being unable to look at himself.
The biosocial model says biology loads the gun and the environment pulls the trigger, but neither of them signs for him. Nina, his twin sister, shared his genes and his origins and took the opposite path. Johan turned ordinary people into weapons with a precision only possible in someone who knows exactly what he is doing.
Johan came out of Kinderheim 511, an orphanage that tried to manufacture children with no name, no bonds and no memory. No one taught him the rules because the aim was to erase them. Socialisation fails when upbringing fails; here it did not fail through neglect, it was designed to destroy. Some of those responsible never sat in this dock.
Charges: The murders of Sollozzo and Captain McCluskey, the coordinated slaughter of the heads of the rival families while he stood as godfather to his nephew, and the death of his brother-in-law.
Fredo grew up at the same table and was never like him. Daniel Glaser explains it: hearing the reasons for crime is not enough, one has to identify with whoever embodies them. Michael admired his father and wanted to inherit his respect. He chose his teacher, and as a pupil he far surpassed the lesson.
Michael wanted another life: the war, university, a girlfriend from outside the clan. But he had spent his childhood hearing that the family is above the law and that violence is part of the business. Sutherland showed that crime is learned in the intimate group, and those lessons woke up the day his father was shot.
Charges: The hunting of Jews in hiding in occupied France, including the massacre of a family concealed beneath the floor of a farmhouse, and the strangling of an actress who was spying for the Allies.
Landa was no fanatic: he was a professional. He hunted people because he was good at it and it made him prosper, and when the war turned he sold out his own side in exchange for a house on Nantucket. Crime as a chosen career, with calculation and ambition. Every victim was a credit on his record.
Landa’s body does not raise the alarm: no sweat, no tremor, no racing pulse. Adrian Raine links that low physiological reactivity to the absence of the fear that holds everyone else back. The alarm that would have stopped anyone else never went off in Landa. That explains how he could do what he did without anything in him resisting.
Charges: The sacrifice of the entire Band of the Hawk, his own comrades, at the Eclipse in order to be reborn as Femto, and the sexual assault on Casca.
Guts and Casca grew up in the same brutal world and chose loyalty. Griffith, faced with the decision, gave up those who loved him in exchange for his dream. He weighed the kingdom against their lives and chose the kingdom. There was no outburst and no deception: there was a conscious choice, and it is the most atrocious act of his story.
Griffith was born a commoner in a feudal world where only blood or war allows anyone to rise. The nobles used him and then destroyed him, and he ended up tortured, with neither body nor kingdom. Bronfenbrenner makes us read every layer around him: an order that taught him, from childhood, that people are steps on the way to the top.
Charges: The kidnapping and torture of the writer Paul Sheldon, whose ankles she broke so he could not escape, and the death of the police officer who came looking for him.
Feminist criminology asks us to use the same yardstick: judge the harm by the harm. Calling Annie mad is the shortcut reserved for violent women. She planned, held captive and maimed a man so that he would write what she wanted. That is not a symptom: it is a crime with an author.
Annie lived alone in an isolated house, with no one to see her or stop her. Walter Reckless explained behaviour through two kinds of containment: the inner one, a person’s own brakes, and the outer one, made of bonds and community. Both had failed Annie, and the snow finished closing the world around her.
Charges: The creation of Project Mayhem, a sabotage network that culminated in blowing up the buildings of several credit card companies, and the death of one of its members during an operation.
Tyler did not offend out of need: he was after the rush of crossing the line. Cultural criminology studies that thrill of crime, and he turned it into a doctrine, with rules and an army of nameless men. Whoever organises destruction as a spectacle answers for every building and every life lost along the way.
Tyler is born from the emptiness of a man who had everything and could find no reason to get up in the morning. Durkheim warned that anomie strikes in abundance too, when norms no longer give meaning to desire. Project Mayhem was the brutal answer to that lack of meaning. And Tyler was, moreover, the other face of the narrator himself.
Charges: The murder of his brother Mufasa in a stampede, the attempt to kill his nephew Simba after making him believe he was to blame, and the usurpation of the throne.
Queer criminology forces us to separate the act from the way of being. Scar is not on trial for his voice or his elegance, but for throwing his brother into a stampede, convincing a cub that it was his fault and sending others to kill him. That is premeditated fratricide, and it is the only thing being judged here.
Scar was born second in a kingdom where only the firstborn inherits. He lived in the shadow of a stronger, more celebrated brother, and Simba’s birth shut him out of the crown for good. Relative deprivation explains that rage: not that of someone who has nothing, but of someone who keeps comparing what he has with what he was denied.
Charges: Armed robberies, including the botched Blackwater job, several homicides and the abandonment of the members of his gang who had been most loyal to him.
For Dutch there was always someone else to blame, harm that did not matter or a victim who had it coming. Sykes and Matza showed that such alibis are not invented after the crime: they make it possible beforehand. Every job was the last and the necessary one, and with that promise he justified deaths and betrayals to the very end.
Dutch belonged to a West that was ending, the West of outlaws with their code of loyalty and freedom. In 1899 the railway, the banks and the Pinkerton agency were imposing another law. Thorsten Sellin explained it: when two codes of conduct collide, the losing group’s code becomes crime. Dutch clung to his while the world changed around him.
On discovering his origins, Sephiroth decided that humanity was a usurper and that he was destined to become a god. Cognitive criminology describes that thinking style which makes harm seem logical, just and even obligatory. He burned an entire village because his own reasoning gave him permission, and he followed that reasoning to the end.
Sephiroth had neither father nor mother: he was an experiment raised for war, with an identity made of lies. Bowlby taught that secure attachment is the foundation on which the self rests. When he learned the truth, there was no bond to cushion the fall, and he clung to the only mother he was offered: Jenova.
