Death and the Legal System

I'm trying this new layout they're instituting for Blogger for this post. It's going to take some getting used to.

I saw this post on Tumblr a couple weeks ago about Lord Death Man, a villain from the Batman manga, who among other tricks, would enter a trancelike state resembling death whenever he was captured to escape being sent to jail.

This doesn't seem like it would work, since he'd show up again committing crimes later, demonstrating he hadn't, in fact, died. There's the possibility he's going for double jeopardy, but is he allowing them finish trying him for the crime first? Does it count if he never served any of his sentence, since he immediately faked his death? What good would it do if he's going out and committing new crimes? Even if he's captured robbing a bank, the fact he faked his death the last time they captured him robbing a bank shouldn't help. This is a new incidence of the same crime.

Obviously, they just needed to cremate him when he faked his death, thus nipping the whole thing in the bud.

This train of thought led, as most do, to the X-Men, and their current situation. In what is definitely not creepy at all, the X-Men have a bunch of cloning vats set up on their posh new island home. If any of them die, they just cook themselves up a new one. It seems like the new one has all the old one's memories, up to the moment of death. Not sure how that works, but I guess it avoids the issue of not remembering potentially crucial information about a threat because you didn't do a backup on your brain recently.

But the thing that interested me was whether or not a clone could be tried for the crimes of its predecessor. It's kind of a moot point for the X-Men, since they seem determined to handle all matters of criminal justice regarding their citizens themselves, even if the crime didn't take place on Krakoa. Setting that aside, if the version of the person who did whatever illegal act is dead, is the duplicate of them that pops up within a few days legally responsible? Could you try them, even though that particular body had nothing to do with the act in question?

I feel as though the Marvel Universe legal system says "No." Magneto stood trial for his actions once, and I believe the court ruled that, because Magneto had, in a story in Defenders, been aged back to an infant and then grown back up, the man on trial was in essence, a new person, and therefore not responsible for the actions of Magneto prior to the de-aging incident.

(I think that's how it went. I'm going off vague memories of Captain America not being happy with the verdict in X-Men vs. the Avengers. The '80s version, not the early 2010s version.) 

And yet, the Magneto who grew up from being abruptly de-aged sure seemed pissed about a lot of the same things as his predecessor, even though those things technically didn't happen to him. Which makes me think the memories came back as he aged. That being the case, it would seem like a clone of a dead person couldn't be held responsible for the deceased's crimes, because the clone didn't exist until after the crimes took place. They could also be considered a new person, even though they're identical to the accused.