Murder is not too difficult: you lock 'em up on the grounds of protecting society, since this was premeditated violence and they might do it again.

Accidental homicide is where it gets tricky. Obviously someone who runs over a child by accident is going to jail. The usual constructive justification is that this "an expression of society's outrage", or similar. There's truth in that. But the real, underlying, motive is surely to inflict suffering on the perpetrator as they inflicted it on their victim - in this case, completely unintentionally. My point is that it's not constructive, it doesn't solve anything except add misery to misery. And it's hypocrisy, because we all know, deep down, that retaliation is about us, not them, but we won't admit it. I hate hypocrisy.

I once got badly injured in a road accident entirely caused by someone else's gross negligence. There were no witnesses and they got off by brazenly lying about what happened. Did I hate them? Yeah, a bit. But then the lying was rational and I might well have done the same in their place. They wanted to escape punishment, which after all serves no purpose to anyone. Did I even want them to go to jail? Actually, no. I would have accepted a sincere apology and some symbolic act of making amends. A day of community service, perhaps. But our system is not set up like that. I think it's a shame.