Eli5 – How can someone be proven not guilty of murder in criminal court but still sued in civil court?
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It’s because it’s extremely rare to be “proven” not guilty. All a “not guilty” verdict in criminal court means is that there wasn’t sufficient evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant should be convicted of a crime. In civil court, charges do not need to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt.
The tldr version is a jury can find someone innocent in criminal, and then that same person does something stupid like “I didn’t do it, but if I did…” and that can be used as evidence in a civil suit. Can’t be tried again for the same crime.
The goals and remedies are different between civil and criminal cases, and therefore the procedure is different between civil and criminal cases. In criminal cases there’s a lot stricter procedures because someone’s liberty is on the line. The courts are a lot stricter on the plaintiff in order to make sure justice is served because the plaintiff is the most powerful one the court will see, the plaintiff is the United States or one of the 50 states, and they are asking to potentially put you in prison. In civil cases The plaintiff can be anybody from a piece of farm equipment to a foreign government, there are a much wider amount of possible plaintiffs and remedies which require totally different rules of procedure.
It would be near impossible to have a trial that conforms to both the rules of criminal procedure and the rules of civil procedure and also be fair to all parties. For instance if you were to combine a civil case with a criminal case, party that would usually be in a civil case would barred from using certain evidence or admissions because If you were to introduce those in a criminal proceeding they would be grounds for a mistrial. On the other side if you were to lower the standard because you have civil lit against joining the case it would be unfair to the accused who can no longer bar evidence that is normally not allowed in criminal proceedings.
Double jeopardy applies to the state in criminal proceedings. Once you’ve been found guilty or not guilty that matters concluded *with the state*. Other plaintiffs can come along. Imagine for a second you hit two people on a tandem bike. Each person has the right to sue you, If one person sues you and gets a judgment against you, that doesn’t bar the second person from later suing you. You can’t say it’s double jeopardy because it’s not double jeopardy, It may be real litigating the same single incident, but it’s a new plaintiff. For convenience oftentimes the court will combine plaintiffs from a single incident, and whatever comes of that judgment is the end of it, but plaintiff s can also request to not be enjoined in that judgment, which means they reserve the right to sue you later if they want no matter what the judgment is.
It isn’t “proven” not guilty, it is not proven guilty. Not quite the same idea. The burden of proof in civil law is less strict than the burden of proof in criminal law. “beyond a reasonable doubt” is the basic idea for deciding conviction in criminal law. “The preponderance of evidence” is the idea in civil law. There is not a burden of proof that a criminal act has occurred, only a need to prove that harm was done and the person involved is responsible for that harm occurring. No criminal behavior is required, even, although that is certainly a big help in a civil trial.
Being found “Not guilty” is not really a decision declaring that the person did not do the act. It is simply saying that the proof is not good enough to declare it as certain. Not guilty is not a declaration of innocence. There is no declaration of innocence in our court system.
Certainly, sometimes the defendants do prove that they could not have done the crime. Usually, though, it is not possible to prove that a person did NOT do the crime (many innocent people cannot prove that they didn’t do it). It is possible to say that the evidence does not prove that the person did the crime, though. Innocent until proven guilty rather than guilty unless you prove your innocence. Big difference.
You don’t necessarily get “proven not guilty.” You just don’t get proven guilty.
In a criminal trial, the standard of evidence is supposed to be “he did it and there’s no way that anyone could reasonably think that he didn’t do it.”
In a civil trial, “he probably did it, but I can understand why you could think he didn’t” is good enough.
For example, only James Earl Ray was proven under the standard of evidence for criminal cases to have been involved in the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr. However, there was enough evidence that he was working with others, including the FBI and other government agencies, to prove a conspiracy under the standard of evidence used in civil trials.
Ideally in criminal court, when you are found “not guilty” it hasn’t necessarily proven that you never committed the crime. It is simply that proof was not sufficient to assign guilt. This doesn’t necessarily carry over to civil cases.
Accused people are not “proven” not guilty by a jury. They are “judged” to be not guilty if there is not sufficient evidence to convince all jurors of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. That is a lot different than being proven innocent.
A civil case is separate from a criminal case. Since the criminal case does not prove innocence it does not affect the ability of a plaintiff to pursue a civil case.
Look at the Kyle Rittenhouse trial. (and this is not meant to say he was guilty or not)
Criminal trial – Found not guilty because regardless of why he brought a gun to the protests, it was only used once he was physically antagonized, and was therefore acting under self-defense laws as they currently exist in that state – and the jury determined that he couldn’t be guilty beyond a reasonable double because it was self-defense according to the letter of the law.
That doesn’t mean that a civil court would necessarily rule the same way. There, the burden of proof only has to be that he took his gun to the protest with the intent to start shit – not even necessarily to kill someone, but just to start shit – and it can be easier to get the majority of jurors to agree that he did intend to start shit and that everything that came after was due to that decision to take a gun to the protests.
If you’re found not guilty in a criminal trial it doesn’t prove innocence, it just means there wasn’t enough evidence to convict.
The different courts have different burdens of proof. In a criminal court the onus is heavily on the prosecution to prove guilt *beyond a reasonable doubt*. Most evidence presented is somewhat circumstantial (short of a credible witness explaining how they saw the accused doing the whole thing) so it’s up to the juror to decide whether the evidence as a whole convinces them that they are definitely guilty.
Civil court only requires the case to be proven on a balance of probabilities: is it more probable than not that they did it? In other words if you’re 50.1% sure in a civil case you can convict but you need to be closer to 99% to convict in a criminal court.
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