Derek Chauvin Trial How Jury Should Decide | National Review
When someone suffers a nonfatal injury because of another person s carelessness, we grasp pretty easily that this is what civil lawsuits are for. When someone dies because of another person s carelessness, however, our angry reaction, wholly natural, is that the other person must be punished because mere money damages can in no sense compensate for the life that has been lost.
But when logic enters into the equation, the logic that undergirds the criminal-justice system, we grudgingly understand the apples-to-oranges problem. We convict and punish people, taking their liberty away, as a penalty for their malevolent intention to cause harm. We do it to make them mend their ways. We re not trying to teach them to be more careful next time. We are trying to overcome their will to prey on society. We are discouraging others from similarly acting on their evil inclinations.
There is no point in doing this to someone who does not intend to cause death or severe injury. Such harms are grave, of course, but they are not driven by the kind of malicious behavior that the criminal-justice system exists to counter.