#lex luthor resurrects him as part of some master plan against the justice league

[why-is-it-always-autumn]

not to beat a dead horse but something I feel like gets ignored a lot in “Why doesn’t Batman kill the Joker?” arguments is the fact that Batman and Joker don’t live in the real world, they live in the DC Universe, where multiple afterlives canonically exist and coming back from the dead is extremely common.  Killing Joker isn’t permanently stopping him from hurting anyone else, it’s sending him off to guest star in Hellblazer or team up with Etrigan unsupervised or make a deal with Necron and now he’s alive again but he has superpowers, or he’s the new ruler of Hell, or he’s a malevolent ghost and now he’s Deadman’s problem.  At least if Batman sends him to Arkham he’ll get an alert when the guy breaks out and he can make reasonable assumptions about things like “how far could he have gotten?” or “What resources does he have?”  Batman sends the guy to Hell and he could be doing literally anything, no timeline on when he’ll turn up again, no way to keep tabs on him short of calling in favors from the magic crowd.  If Joker escapes and comes back he stays a basically human guy with a knack for chemistry and an immunity to his own concoctions.  If he dies and comes back his abilities could be anything from “ghost that appears in the corner of Bruce’s vision to gradually drive him mad” to “literally exactly the same” to “The new Spectre, for some reason”.  There is no way to know.  The only certainty is that at some point he will come back and hurt more people, and there’s no way Batman doesn’t know that.  It’s not mercy or naivety to keep the extremely dangerous mass murderer somewhere you can keep an eye on him instead of booting him into the unknown and hoping for the best.  This is something that needs to be taken into account.