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I think we can all agree that society would be better off without muggers. (...)

It disgusts me that there are so many people out there that think criminals should have more rights than law-abiding citizens.

[/ QUOTE ] I think society would be better off without moralistic "law-abiding citizens" that think they can decide who deserves to live and die. That doesn't mean I condone the killing of these people.

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So who in your view is allowed to judge people?

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I don't really know, but somebody should create a legal system or something, where individuals play various important roles, one of which is judging and deciding what happens to people. We could call them deciders.

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But if the guy is in the act of committing a crime, and it is 100% obviously being committed, and there is NO confusion, why let the chance that the legal system will [censored] up get in the way?

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Well, I'll begin with the assumption that responsibility for making this decision rightfully falls upon the legal system. If someone disagrees with that premise, then we can't really go further.

Most of the time the legal system isn't going to [censored] up, right? If there is too high of an error rate, we fix it or replace it.

One major problem with people taking things into their own hands is that it's too easy to be mistaken, or take things too far because you're in the heat of the moment. What if a bystander witnesses this take place? It's obvious what's going on, so he could kill the mugger. But in other similar situations, it might be "obvious" but it turns out that he's just wrong. To admittedly stretch things, what if this situation is a demonstration in a self defense course, with the students being out of the bystander's viewpoint?

From an accuracy standpoint, we believe that an investigation and subsequent trial will be less prone to error than civilians acting in the moment. On top of that, we believe that due process is a right that should be granted to everyone, regardless of how obvious what the resulting outcome will be. This is one of the few cases where slippery slope arguments apply, we've seen throughout history how easy it is to abuse human rights when due process is not given.