Joe Chill (Richard Brake)

Biography
Joe Chill claims to have been driven to mug the Waynes because of the desperation of the times (Gotham was undergoing an economic depression because an undisclosed action by the League of Shadows). He is arrested soon after killing Bruce's parents. Years later, he undergoes a hearing to be released from prison as part of a deal to testify against Gotham mob boss Carmine Falcone (with whom he had shared a prison cell) in exchange for parole.

During the hearing, he claims to regret his crime. After the hearing despite police presence, he is killed by one of Falcone's assassins, who was posing as a reporter as he leaves the courtroom. It is later discovered that Falcone had bribed the judge of Chill's case to make the hearing public and bring Chill out into the open. The young Bruce Wayne, who is waiting outside the courtroom with a gun of his own, is thus deprived of his own chance for revenge; as with Year Two, it is left ambiguous whether or not he would have actually killed Chill. Bruce's lost chance of killing Chill himself helps him realize what justice really is, and his memories of a gun taking his parents' lives brings him to his rule that he will not kill. Bruce later confronts Falcone, who taunts him by saying that Chill bragged that Thomas Wayne "begged like a dog" before his death (this is a lie as we see the murder of Bruce Waynes parents earlier in the film).

Behind the scenes
Overall, Joe Chill is depicted as a tragic character in the movie, since during his mugging of Bruce's parents he's shown to constantly be shaking from what he was doing. Also, later when Ra's Al Ghul informs Bruce that the League of Shadows caused Gotham's economic depression, he commits that Bruce's parents were "gunned down by one the very people they were trying to help."