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You have hit-upon exactly the perfect proof of why Justice has to be left to karma, & harm-reduction has to be what humankind’s doing.
Murdercide is what New Scientist called the suicide-bombers, as murder is the point, & that needed to be in the term
Harm-reduction, correction, & preventing-future-harm are the 3 that humankind can do, but Justice is something that only karma ( “what a soul sows, that soul has no-alternative but to reap” ) can enforce, at ITS timescale ( many-many-lives, not mere-years ).
The details of different cases would have to be the basis of sorting-out how harm-reduction & correction ought be done, & eventually the principles required would become clear, & could be codified, but the underlying-fact is that Justice requires that ALL the guilty be corrected, & the rude fact that some remove themselves, so as to exempt themselves from accountability, means that at our timescale, Justice is only an aspiration/anchor/direction, not something that we can guarantee.
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litchralee@sh.itjust.works 8 hours ago
The absolute first thing is to establish the jurisdiction of this scenario. The answer will be vastly different if the jurisdiction is California/USA than if the jurisdiction were South Susan. No shade against South Sudan, but we are talking about criminal and civil law, so the details might be very different.
But supposing this is a jurisdiction that follows in the Anglo-American common law (such as California, and I’ll proceed using California as the setting), then we can make some generally-true statement, some of which confirm what you’re already written:
With all that said, the entire line of inquiry into the dead assailant’s will, or to their parent’s will, or anything like that, is entirely inapplicable. Children or parents do not inherit the sins of others, at least where criminal liability and civil lawsuits are concerned. Unless, of course, the parents participated somehow or willfully neglected a duty to report (very few of these exist in California, unless the victims were undoubtedly known to be children; see mandatory reporting laws). Thus, these other people cannot be sued nor criminally punished.
The other commenter correctly said that what we call the “justice system” is more accurately called “harm reduction”. That’s not wrong, but I would post that the crimimal law system is about harm reduction (nb: I do not endorse the carcereal state of imprisoning huge segments of the population, disproportionately by race), whereas civil lawsuits are about equity and compensation.
Both systems exist in tandem to prevent people from achieving a bloodier form of justice in the streets, like in days of yore: pistols at dawn, dueling in general, “bigger army” diplomacy, midnight slaughters of whole families, and other such unpleasantries. It’s definitely not perfect, and it needs reforms in many parts, but the structure serves a purpose and so far, it’s what we have and the best that we have.