So after rewatching at4w's cry for justice videos again and being reminded of the stupid, stupid aftermath of that story, and how Green arrow basically destroyed his life killing prometheus and then is publically unmasked and goes before the jury, pleads guilty, then being found not guilty but still banished from his city, i realized there was the barebones of a good story here, just utterly butchered by the exectution, but with a bit of tweaking, you could make it work.
Basically, rewrite the entire story so that Ollie kills prometheus, then realises it was a mistake and doesnt kill the electrocutioner just like in the actual comic, then have him turn himself in, and have him plead guilty, focus on the aftermath of absolutely everything, with him fully expecting to face the music... Then rather than a nonsensical not guilty and yet punished with banishment anyway, instead have ollie face a Jury nullification, or a perverse verdict as its sometimes called, the american right of any jury to overide a judge or the law in general, if they feel that the law in this case is unjust, unfair, or there is such a special circumstance that the person does not deserve punishment.
Then just have the aftermath instead be about Ollie suddenly realize the system is NOT going to punish him for killing the man, for the exact same reasons he killed prometheus(him killing 100 000 people in star city), but with the twist that he himself has come to the conclusion by then that it was wrong, and no matter what the jury says, he is still unmasked, still regrets what he actually did, he's still alienated absolutely everyone close to him, from his wife, to his son, to the league, his grandaughter is still dead, etc.
I feel like this way, you still got the same effect the actual, terrible comic was going for, but with aftermath actually making perfect legal sense, while also showcasing a more realistic take on something we rarely see in superhero comics, an actual, honest to the lord legal trial.
Hell, you could have an entire issue just devoted to the night of the soul, then the bittersweet aftermath and all it entails.
Addendum to the last ask.
I just realized i left out one kinda critical component to green arrow prometheus question.
Namely it was supposed to be in the CONTEXT of cry for justice.
CFJ is obviously NOT a good story, and should NOT be the jumping off point to use as the intentional nadir of green arrow... The question was more in the context of if you HAD to use cry for justice, you could at the very least also go all in on the idea and use it's finale to tell a story of GA, so sure of himself that he is going put it all right, unheeding of what personal consequences it might have, only to later realize it was a massive mistake(also, i kinda forgot to point out the obviosu fact that if GA could do this, he could by all accounts have taken Prometheus in alive to face justice, and SOMEBODY would have pointed that out), and then use it as a base to tell future stories in a post secret idendity world, something you obviously cannot do with, say, mainstream batman.
The dynamic you describe reminds me of 'Kingdom Come' and the Magog subplot, but here it's the focus instead of a side-character whose POV is never directly explored. If it could work there, I could see something similar working for a Green Arrow AU, even without Alex Ross drawing it. ;)
Overall, though, I have personally become rather loathe to tolerate stories examining whether superheroes kill. Except in some extreme cases, like Superman in this recent movie even going out of the way to save a squirrel from collateral damage, it doesn't really make any sense for the character in question. Spider-Man and Batman can kind of slide over the bar since their origins have them explicitly motivated by wanting to prevent death, but even then I don't think 'The Dark Knight' did wrong by Batman by having him accidentally kill Two-Face when he tackled him to prevent a shooting. There doesn't have to be a hard line where a superhero cannot under any circumstances take a life, and when that line isn't there, storylines that are specifically about challenging that line are revealed to be more about a weird quirk of the genre than any real storytelling potential.
But Green Arrow is a guy who got good with a bow'n'arrow after being shipwrecked on a deserted island for a few years and then decided to become a costumed crimefighter with that skill. There's nothing in there that should suggest a preoccupation with not taking a life- unless the writer is too steeped in Comic Book Culture and is looking to do yet another take on that old contrived conundrum.
The only reason superheroes don't kill in American comics is because of the Comics Code, which was trying to sanitize comics of violence to prevent a public backlash. Before that, Batman threw villains into vats of acid and no one questioned it. The failure of the Code in the modern era has allowed American comics to get as violent as they want, especially since the audience is mostly middle-aged dudes who have been reading comics all their lives, but there's still vestigial element to the culture that heroes aren't allowed to kill, even though they do lots of other illegal stuff and the challenges to that standard against killing are often pretty contrived and too dependent on certain genre conventions like villains being able to escape any imprisonment while other genre conventions like no one staying dead are ignored.
In the Marvel movies, the heroes killing villains in clear-cut life-or-death scenarios doesn't have any audiences questioning the violence or whether the heroes are heroes. The movies don't dwell on it, so the audience doesn't have to, either. But American comic books, because of the baggage of the Code, have this hangup where heroes are allowed to perpetrate all kinds of violence so long as a life isn't taken, and in most cases life-taking is framed only as something that can be deliberate and is always a proxy for the justice system itself. People ask why Batman doesn't kill the Joker to prevent the deaths of all his future victims, but isn't the real argument there about the death penalty, and then isn't that something which should include the actual institutions of justice rather than a costumed vigilante who is sometimes even an authorized deputy of the law?
So I've just developed this aversion to give the matter any attention. Either do it like the Marvel movies where death is something that can happen when violence is in play but murder is something else, or else create a fantasy world where superheroes need never be tarnished with the matter.
Your idea of bringing in the jury nullification and then exploring the legal and moral impact is a good way to get back to what the matter should really be about, but that's if we had to make Cry For Justice functional. I'd just rather avoid it entirely.
