How much responsibility should you have when your laziness kills people?
In the US, we kill people that get angry and kill people.
Why is laziness any different?
BTW - I don't believe in capital punishment.
Ahhh... the answers to your question are complex in detail but fundamental and ancient at base. I'm no lawyer but these are important principles.
Civilized and law-driven societies make critical and age-old distinctions among various degrees of premeditated murder, criminally negligent vs. truly accidental manslaughter, negligence contributing to death (I think criminal vs. civil considerations can apply quite differently here). The question of capital punishment or not is far deeper and more nuanced than "kill people who ... kill people". Laziness vs. hot anger vs. cold-blooded plotting are
extremely different, and it's frankly not just intellectually lazy, but socially very dangerous for citizens to be unable to grasp those distinctions.
It's easy to pronounce that one does or does not believe in capital punishment; what's really more important is that punishment of whatever form be carried out in a properly-considered way and only after a properly constituted process that upholds serious, equal and established principles of law.
What a civilized and law-driven society does
not do is to charge, try, judge and punish based not on pre-established law and relevant precedent, but on news chatter, social-justice narratives or the public's demands for retribution after the fact in a sensationalized case.
Regarding China and other near-totalitarian countries, It's quite common and quite reprehensible that, for example, a Chinese factory manager might get a show trial (or no trial) and a bullet in the aftermath of a fire in which locked-in workers perished with no escape - while many other similar factories continue to operate in sweatshop conditions with similar potential catastrophes. The adjudged guilty manager was most likely carrying out the production-quota demands of the local party officials, then became the scapegoat when it went spectacularly wrong.
In the case of the highway barrier, do you really think that one "lazy" civil engineer or draftsman can correctly be assigned responsibility for a dangerous feature which, by the way, may have taken decades in the USA and Europe to be generally recognized, communicated, best-practice-modified, regulated in code and enforced in inspection practice?
Which employee or official, in which office along the chain, are you going to say committed a Murder out of laziness which (per your question) is hardly different from that of a depraved criminal with a knife?
What law do you want on the books to codify that, if an engineer specifies a safety rail with a dangerous end-cap feature, he may later be charged with murder?
Or maybe it was not the original civil engineer, but the draftsman who documented the plan.
Or maybe the checker who approved the plans.
Or maybe the budget-office official who sent the plans back for mandated cost reduction.
Or maybe the construction worker who didn't follow the drawing.
Or maybe the foreman who ordered the workers to take a shortcut.
Or maybe the truck driver who delivered incorrect materials.
Or maybe the warehouse clerk who requested the wrong components to be loaded on the truck.
Or maybe the government inspector who missed the deviation or violation.
Or maybe the contractor who paid off the inspector to ignore the details and sign-off the job.
Or maybe the local party official who pressured the contractor to come in ahead of schedule and under budget, maybe to have enough slush-fund yuan left over for the new carpet his wife wants in the house.
Or maybe the Beijing central-planning official who pressured the local party official to improve his district's performance and speed up the highway projects.
Or maybe the Interior Minister who needs a terrific performance report from the central planners, to advance his standing with the Premier.
I think you can guess approximately where on the list the punishment is likely to be meted out. More towards the beginning rather than the end, unless there is some serious infighting and power-struggle within the Forbidden City, for which a well-publicized accident provides just the needed political wedge.
In the absence of a robust and fair legal tradition, power and expediency become the law. And the resulting rulings are
always explained based on Justice and the Interests of the People. If you are a devotee of the "news" in our country, you will see this foreboding pattern developing at an accelerating pace today.
I would urge you to consider these points seriously before you flippantly make an equivalence between Death-Penalty Murder and lazy or ill-advised infrastructure design. The latter can indeed have serious or deadly consequences but criminal prosecution and retribution are a very poor way to develop robust public-safety practices.
