You see, he was escorting them alone at that point and it was so bitterly cold that he worried the criminals would get frost bite if he bound them in any way, so he didn’t. Near the end, Roosevelt had to stay awake 40 hours straight to guard the prisoners as they walked and rested. The whole affair ended up being a few hundred mile trek, which had to be partially on foot because ice made the river unnavigable at a certain point. Rather than let it go, Roosevelt dropped everything and built a new boat, tracked them down and captured the thieves. In a nutshell a couple guys stole a boat from Roosevelt in the dead of winter. On that note, Teddy Roosevelt was once thanked by boat thief Michael Finnigan for not killing him in this sort of scenario, despite the extreme risk to Roosevelt at the time. A body is so much safer to transport and people were quick to believe a dangerous criminal would fight tooth and nail to escape because, after all, in many cases they probably did if they knew being brought in was going to likely result in a hanging. Granted, if no one was around to witness, whose to say the dangerous criminal you killed didn’t actively threaten your life in an imminent way to cause you to defend yourself? And given that bringing such a criminal in across long distances used to be an extremely dangerous affair in many cases, anecdotally it seems like it wasn’t uncommon to simply rid the world of the alleged criminal first and then lie about what happened after. It also incentivized criminals to not try to flee in the first place upon discovery. The logic behind this was seemingly that chasing down a fleeing person could be dangerous in unforeseen ways. history it was legal to use deadly force against a fleeing felon, even if your own life wasn’t immediately threatened. Thus, you could only kill them if it was self defense, which wouldn’t have been any different than if someone attacked you outside of any bounty scenario, with one caveat. To get away with killing such a person you were attempting to collect a bounty on the person needed to be resisting in some way, particularly in a way that threatened your own life. He seemingly didn’t even know the Ford brothers were there to arrest him that day. You see, James was unarmed at the time of his death, and just as importantly was not in any way resisting arrest or attempting to flee. Unfortunately for Charley and Robert, when they went to collect the reward, they instead found themselves promptly arrested for murder and soon after were sentenced to hang. When James turned his back on the brothers, reportedly to clean a dusty photo, Robert Ford shot him in the back of the head. After eating, the trio walked into the living room. Ultimately the Ford brothers arranged with the governor in secret to bring their buddy Jesse in.ĭeal struck, on the morning of April 3, 1882, the brothers had breakfast with James. ![]() The subsequent posters noted “Wanted Dead or Alive Jesse or Frank James”. Missouri governor Thomas Crittenden negotiated with various rail companies to offer a $5,000 ($131,000 today) reward each for the capture of Jesse James or his brother Frank. For example, consider the infamous murder of Jesse James at the hands of his outlaw buddies Charley and Robert Ford. Just because a poster stated something like “Dead or Alive” it did not grant any individual the right to kill the person without legal consequences. ![]() To answer the first question- yes, there are many known instances of such “Dead or Alive” posters being put up by the state and other entities, but that doesn’t actually tell the whole story. But did these actually ever exist and could you actually kill someone legally when such a poster was issued by the authorities? Labyrinth900 asks: Were “Wanted Dead or Alive” bounties a real thing? In other words, if you found someone that is wanted dead, could you legally shoot and kill them and collect a bounty, and not be charged for murder?Ī classic Hollywood trope is the idea of a poster with the photo of a given criminal along with very large print text that would say something like “Wanted- Dead or Alive”.
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