Lethal force to prevent a robbery, in general? Well you can rob someone with the threat of non-lethal violence or even aggravated theft involving extortion. I suppose if there is no danger to anybody outside of the loss of property of some kind then attempting to kill the perpetrator to prevent the crime is too much. At that point I think we would unquestionably be talking about vigilantism; taking on the role of judge-jury-exectuioner without even the defensibility of trying to protect another life.
By science, I'm starting to sound ridiculously soft-on-crime and I'm really not. I guess that while I understand that our legal system is far from perfect that it really is the best in the world and that while I can disagree with the outcomes of a fair number of cases its still preferable to leave 'justice' to the various arms of law except when life is imminently threatened. In those cases we need people to act heroically.
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"The courts that first rode the warhorse of virtual representation into battle on the res judicata front invested their steed with near-magical properties." ~27 F.3d 751
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