Let us begin with a simple, but realistic example that is not for the faint hearted.
Imagine an aggressive 21 year-old man who enjoys driving at
very high speeds on the highway, behaving dangerously thrills him.
One day he is driving at 75 miles per hour in the middle of
the day on a semi-urban undivided roadway that has one lane in each direction,
a 45 mile per hour speed limit, and intermittent traffic lights.
He sees that a traffic light up ahead is about to turn red.
Although not drunk, his blood alcohol is just above the legal limit.
Instead of slowing down and stopping as he should, the man decides to run the light
for the fun of it and speeds up to more than 90 miles an hour to make the light.
Alas!
The light turns red just as he reaches the intersection and
a crossing vehicle properly enters it.
Our driver crashes into the hapless other vehicle, killing the driver and
paralyzing the passenger, who is irreversibly quadriplegic.
The physical evidence and eye witnesses leave no
doubt about the driver's exceptionally dangerous behavior and a breathalyzer test
confirms that his blood alcohol content was above the legal limit.
How does united state law respond to such an unnecessarily sad tragedy?
First, the families of the victims could sue the driver for
civil damages to compensate them for the harm done by his negligent behavior.
This is a province of tort law.
The legal rules that deal with certain types of civil harms
including personal injury.
This course on introduction to law includes a module on torts.
Of course, money can never replace a human life or fix irreversible disability.
But the point of civil damages is to try and make the victims as whole as
possible given the inevitable limitations of money as a remedy.
But the driver's behavior also manifests massive moral indifference
to the rights and interests of others.
It was a gross violation of the duty we all owe
each other to avoid unnecessary harms.
Compelling the driver to pay money damages seems an insufficient response.
His behavior seems to call for
a public response on behalf of society for societal blame and punishment.
This is the province of the criminal law.
Crimes are distinct from civil wrongs because crimes morally wrong all
members of society and are prosecuted by the state rather than by private parties.
Reflecting this distinction criminal cases are titled, not Smith versus Jones.
Rather they are the titled The People versus Jones, or the State versus Jones,
or the United States versus Jones in federal criminal cases.
Crimes or wrongs against we the people, as well as the individual victims.
Criminal law and tort law and
both methods of regulating our lives together and they share some goals.
Each involves some degree of blame and each includes sanctions, but
only criminal law is based fundamentally on moral values about what we
owe each other, and then imposes state blame and
punishment for the gross failures of obligation that occur all too often.
State blame and punishment are the most severe impositions of state power,
because they evol, involve official public blame and stigma and the infliction of
punishment, that is, the infliction of pain, because the offender deserves it.
Because criminal blame and punishment are such severe inflictions,
there is a different level of burden of proof in civil and criminal law.
In civil law, the party bringing the suit must prove
the wrongful injury by a standard known as the preponderance of the evidence,
which is interpreted to mean more likely than not.
In other words, if the evidence slightly favors the plaintiff, that is, the party
who is seeking compensation, the plaintiff wins and the defendant must pay damages.
In criminal law by contrast, the state must prove that the defendant's behavior
was criminal beyond a reasonable doubt, this does not mean beyond any doubt.
That degree of certainty is beyond human capacities in most cases.
But before the state can impose blame and punishment, it must demonstrate with
a very high degree of certainty that the defendant's conduct was criminal.
We impose such a high degree of burden on the prosecution because the consequences
are so potentially grave to the defendant.
We favor the error of acquitting the guilty to the error of
convicting the innocent.
The differing levels of burden of proof thus reflect how much more is at stake in
a criminal prosecution than in a private civil lawsuit.