Sometimes the authorities will know who committed a crime but cannot charge them: because they have some form of immunity (often of the diplomatic sort) or they cannot be extradited from their current location. Sometimes the criminal will be a Smug Snake who will even confess their crimes, knowing that the locals cannot or will not do anything to them.
One way of dealing with this (in fiction, at least: the Real Life validity of some of these tactics would be dubious) is to trick the perp into unwittingly travelling to a jurisdiction where they can be charged. Expect the protagonists to have tipped the local authorities off to be waiting for them.
A Sister Trope to Justice by Other Legal Means. Compare to Jurisdiction Friction.
Examples:
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Comic Books
- In their battle in Batman Eternal, the newly reintroduced Spoiler tricks her father, the Cluemaster, into a motorcycle chase. When he crashes his bike and tells the authorities the GCPD are supposed to be on his side (as corrupt mole Jason Bard had taken over Jim Gordon's usual duties), the police inform him he has run out of Gotham miles before. This is all according to Spoiler's plan.
- In Buck Godot: Zap Gun for Hire: In one story, a Corrupt Corporate Executive coerces Buck into obtaining an alien mass teleportation technology for his company. It's mentioned that he doesn't fear the Law because he spends all his time on a space station in the galactic equivalent of international waters. At the end of the story, Buck uses the teleporter to transport the entire space station to the surface of a nearby planet, allowing the Law Machines to swoop in and arrest everyone.
Films — Live-Action
- At the end of 49th Parallel, Hirth, the last fugitive, is locked in a freight car with Brock, an AWOL Canadian soldier, as the train crosses the US/Canadian border. Hirth surrenders his gun to a U.S. Customs official and demands to be taken to the German embassy. Brock explains that Hirth, now world famous, is wanted in Canada for murder, and points out that neither of them is listed on the freight manifest. The customs officer uses this as an excuse to send the train back, phoning Canadian customs and telling them there are two items not on the manifest, and to either put them on the manifest or take them off the train.
- The A-Team starts with the team baiting a Mexican cartel into chasing them over the Rio Grande in helicopters, making the cartel guilty of invading US airspace and getting shot down by Air Force jets.
Face: Warning: You are currently engaging in hostile action with agents of the US government.
Cartel Boss: No, you attacked me!
Face: Repeat: You are currently engaging in hostile action with agents of the US government... [they cross the border] ...over US air space.
Cartel Boss: Wait, what? - Inverted in Kaamelott: Premier Volet, where Arthur and Venec are taken captive and brought back to Kaamelott by a bounty hunter. As they cross the border into the duchy of Aquitania (which is under Kaamelott's jurisdiction), Arthur speaks up for the first time since his capture, telling the guard that he's been Made a Slave (Kaamelott outlawed slavery) and demands that the guard arrest everyone and bring them to the Duke of Aquitania for trial. The guard is indifferent to this, until Venec has the bright idea to yell out that the Duchess of Aquitania is a whore, which promptly gets everyone arrested as Arthur wanted.
- At the end of Porky's, Porky and his sheriff brother chase the boys across the county line, where the local police are waiting for them.
Literature
- Discworld: In The Fifth Elephant, Vimes is named as Ankh-Morpork's ambassador to Uberwald, where the dwarves, werewolves and vampires keep an uneasy peace. As a By-the-Book Cop, Vimes can't go around arresting every troublemaker there, but learns that the Ankh-Morpork embassy counts as Ankh-Morpork territory, so Commander Vimes of the City Watch is well within his rights to chase after a murderer who committed his crime in the embassy.
- In "A Chore for Company Z" in J.T.'s Hundredth by J.T. Edson, Company Z is called when a Mexican lawman is killed investigating a rustling operation on Texas/Mexico border. Identifying the killer as a Texan rancher, they cannot arrest him as he cannot be extradited. On the pretext of taking him to a doctor for treatment for his gunshot wound, they place him in the back of a truck with an Angry Guard Dog. The dog snarls at him every time he moves, even after the truck stops. Someone eventually calls the dog off and, when the rancher works up his courage to stick his head outside the truck, he finds he is in a Mexican village just over the border with the Federales waiting for him.
- In the finale of Isekai Monster Breeder, an usurper who has stolen the Demon King's body and is facing down protagonist Souta has gone One-Winged Angel, and none of the Heroes, especially Souta himself, can even come close to having a snowball's chance in hell of beating him in a straight up fight, but Souta's grand plan took that into account. Souta takes up the very, very dangerous task of keeping the guy distracted until his castle has breached Heaven. At that point, the "useless" Goddess Aphrodite can wield her full power. She responds by blasting him to dust with her spell "Goddess Blessing" that she tried, and failed, to use at the start of the story due to God's Hands Are Tied.
- There's an unusual twist in Marcia Muller's short story "Knives at Midnight", featuring her regular PI Sharon McCone. A Mexican-American gangster who is an old enemy of McCone lures a rival to Mexico and stabs him to death there, knowing that he won't be prosecuted since the local police and prosecutors are in his pocket. McCone gets him put in jail by getting one of the victim's mooks to falsely testify that he was challenged to go to Mexico for a knife fight to the death, allowing the gangster to be prosecuted and convicted under a Wild West-era Californian law against "duelling out of the state".
- In Erle Stanley Gardner's The Bigger They Come, an inversion is used. Protagonist Donald Lam puts into a motion a scheme where he is arrested in California on a complaint from Arizona. After he's extradited, he confesses to a murder in California. An attempt to extradite him back to California fails because he wasn't a fugitive from justice. He had not fled from the state; he was forcibly taken from the state against his will.
Live-Action TV
- Bassie & Adriaan: This is how the bad guys (de Baron, B100 en Handige Harry) were arrested at the end of "Bassie en Adriaan: De reis vol verrassingen" (or "Bassie en Adriaan op reis door Amerika", depending on when you watched). After an adventurous journey through the U.S. (during which the villains secretly tried to sabotage them), Bassie and Adriaan finally figure out that they're being followed. Hence, Bassie and Adriaan come up with a plan to get them arrested for a crime the villains committed prior to the eponymous journey (a burglary shown near the start of the season). They decide to lure the bad guys to Sint Maarten (which has a French and a Dutch jurisdiction). There, they taunt the bad guys into leaving the French jurisdiction and entering the Dutch one, where they're promptly arrested by the Royal Marechaussee.
- Blue Bloods has an episode where Frank tricks a gang-leader serving life in prison into confessing to ordering the murder of a friend of his from prison. The gang leader gloats that he's already serving life in a New York prison, he's never getting out, and he still has the reach to order deaths from his cell in a non-death penalty state. Frank nods. Then, he makes a show of walking away before he turns and reveals to the gang leader that the man he'd had killed had served as a member of a Federal task force, making it the murder of a Federal agent. That makes him eligible for the Death Penalty at the Federal level, and also he's being transferred to a Federal prison in another state with no means of contacting his gang to order anything else.
- Burn Notice: In "Truth and Reconciliation", the Client is a Haitian who came to Miami to try to force a fugitive official from the Duvalier dictatorship to return to Haiti to stand trial for human rights abuses. Team Westen plans to trick him there by presenting themselves as representatives of a US company who can fake him up a new identity so he can live openly, but they tell him they need him to come back to Haiti in person to do it. After that plan falls apart, they just kidnap him and ship him home in a crate.
- By Any Means: In ep. 1x03, the team have to find a way to extract a shady real estate developer who has taken refuge inside the Colombian Embassy. although it initially appears that they are planning to abduct him during a an embassy party, their real plan is to fake an abduction attempt to spook him into attempting to get out of the embassy and accept the ambassador's offer of a plane ride to Colombia. Only after the car has left the embassy does he realise it is not heading for the airport. When he starts to object, Jack, Jessica and Charlie pull a Not My Driver by lowering the screen between the front and back seats before leaving him handcuffed to the railings outside a police station.
- The Closer uses an inverted version in "Good Housekeeping", where a perp flees Brenda's jurisdiction but she tricks him into confessing to a crime he can be arrested for in the new jurisdiction. Spoiled rich youth Austin Philips flees south of the border to avoid prosecution for killing the daughter of a Mexican immigrant. Knowing she can't get him extradited, Brenda goes to Mexico to get the full story from him, and he refuses to come back to the US no matter what she tries. Brenda meets him in a Mexican police station and asks him for the story so she can close the case, and offers to drop the accessory charges against his parents. The killer tearfully confesses that he did it by "accident". Then Brenda hands the Mexican cops evidence the victim was actually born in Mexico, not America, which made her a Mexican citizen. The Mexican cops take Austin into custody despite his sudden pleas to go back to the US with Brenda.
- CSI: Miami: In "Blood Brothers", Horatio is unable to arrest two brothers for a pair of murders because they are the sons of Baracan's Ambassador General Antonio Cruz and thus have Diplomatic Impunity. However, one of the victims was a Canadian citizen drowned in the swimming pool at the Canadian consulate, meaning she was murdered on Canadian soil. When the brothers take their boat into international waters, Horatio arranges to have the Bahamian authorities waiting for them. As their boat has Bahamian registration, in international waters, it is under Bahamian jurisdiction and the brothers don't have diplomatic immunity in the Bahamas.
- CSI: NY: In "Point of No Return", Stella Bonasera and Detective Angell lure an antiquities smuggler (and Attache to the Greek Embassy, thus having immunity) connected to several murders to the shipping yard. Instead of selling him the rare Macedonian coins he was looking for, they lock him up in a container and send him to Cyprus, where is he wanted for smuggling.
- Happened once on The Dukes of Hazzard, when Bo and Luke were captured, followed by Boss Hogg and Rosco, in neighboring Osage County, by Boss' rival Colonel Claiborne (and his Rosco equivalent, Sheriff Cathcarte). After escaping Cathcarte's chain gang, the inevitable car chase — and subsequent crash — ensues. When the dust clears, our heroes realize they've crossed the county border and are now in Hogg and Rosco's jurisdiction; the latter two jump at the chance to get back at the assholes who chained them up.
- Law & Order: In one episode, Ben Stone neds the testimony of an especially slimy career criminal to get a conviction in the murder-of-the-week. He reluctantly promises the witness full immunity "for all crimes committed in New York County" in return for the man's testimony. The witness's lawyer approves and the man gleefully testifies in full — including admitting to a major felony he committed in Brooklyn. A few minutes later the witness is arrested on the courthouse steps. The crook shouts angrily that Stone gave him immunity — to which Stone replies that he gave the man immunity in New York County, but Brooklyn is in Kings County, a different jurisdiction, and the agreement of immunity doesn't cover it.
Stone: Next time, sir, get yourself a better lawyer.
- Mission: Impossible:
- In "Fakeout", the leader of an international narcotics syndicate is living in a country that has no extradition treaty with the U.S., so Cinnamon romances him in order to get him out of the country so that he can be legally arrested and stand trial in the U.S. (kidnapping him has been ruled out as being politically embarrassing). The story was recycled in the 1988 series as "Hologram", in which a dictator is fooled into thinking he's on one of his country's islands when he's actually on another island that's US sovereign territory.
- "Incarnate": When the ruthless leader of a criminal gang flees to a Caribbean island that has no extradition treaty with the U.S., the IMF uses her belief in the occult to induce her to return to the US of her own free will so she can be captured and the gold she stole can be recovered.
- Twin Peaks: Cooper and the Twin Peaks Sheriff's Department suspect Jacques Renault may be an accessory to Laura Palmer's murder, but they cannot arrest him as he is working in One-Eyed Jack's, a casino over the Canadian border. Cooper goes undercover in One-Eyed Jack's and poses as a drug lord, luring Renault back to the US with the promise of a lucrative job. The sheriff and deputies immediately arrest him.
Western Animation
- The Simpsons: In "Elementary School Musical", the Springfieldians are astounded by the announcement "live from Stockholm" that Krusty the Clown has won the Nobel Peace Prize. Krusty subsequently boards a plane to Oslo for the award ceremony, but to his surprise the plane lands in The Hague in the Netherlands. A Dutch policeman then reveals that Krusty is to be arrested and tried at the International Court of Justice for his manyfold crimes in Europe (such as dropping a monkey from the Eiffel tower, "aggravated hey-hey" in Greece, and stealing the jokes of a Dutch clown); the Nobel was only a ruse to lure Krusty to Europe.
