Vigilante

A vigilante is a person who violates the law in order to exact what they believe to be justice to criminals, because they think that the criminal will not be caught or will not be sufficiently punished by the legal system.

Criminal Minds
Some vigilantes in various episodes.


 * Marvin Doyle ("A Real Rain") - A schizophrenic court stenographer whose auditory hallucinations (coupled with the murder of his parents) drove him to kill criminals who were acquitted, and claimed to be victims themselves.
 * Ronald Weems ("Sex, Birth, Death") - The head of a neighborhood group ("The Decency Watch") whose frustration with a seemingly lax system prompted him to murder prostitutes, who he viewed as subhuman degenerates.
 * Tobias Hankel ("The Big Game", "Revelations") - A man with multiple personalities, one of which ('Raphael') killed people who had sinned.
 * Jonny McHale ("True Night") - A psychotic comic book writer and artist who survived a brutal attack by a street gang that left his pregnant fiance dead. He then began targeting members of the gang and slaughtered them under the alias 'True Night'.
 * Lou Jenkins ("Memoriam") - Since he murdered pedophile Gary Michaels, this act would technically classify Lou as a full-fledged vigilante.
 * Paul Silvano ("Demonology") - A Catholic priest who targeted and killed (via false exorcisms) a group of men he thought were responsible for the death of another priest, who was an old friend of Silvano's.
 * Boyd Schuller ("Reckoner") - A dying judge who hired hitman Tony Mecacci to eliminate criminals, most of them involved in crimes against children, who were acquitted.

Real World

 * Bernhard Goetz
 * Jonathan Idema
 * William Inmon