I never said you did, come on now. I don't believe that you would want these men charged with murder and facing the consequences of such a charge. They obviously did not commit murder.
With your regard to your example of advice given, I say this. What I told them or did not tell them is not relevent, because in the end the decision made by such person is that person's decision.
People need to know that they have free will. Making the right decision and the intelligent decision in any given situation is the responsibility of a free person, furthermore that is not always guaranteed to happen, and I would venture to say that it occurs less than 50% of the time.
But such is the burden of a free person, because accepting otherwise means that person will not be a free person, but rather a subject of the influence and decisions of others.
Are you certain of that? When your friend approaches you and says, "Hey...I need some advice..." you basically have three choices:
1. You can tell him to get bent and go pound salt.
2. You can deliberately steer him wrong and intentionally give him what you feel is bad advice.
3. You can hear him out and based on your knowledge and experience, give him the best advice you can.
You refer to "free will" and certainly you can do any of the above, but I would submit that a person with a conscience and a moral compass would have their free will over ridden by a "moral obligation" to take course of action #3. If one ignored their moral compass and opted for #1 or #2 just to see what happened 'cause it might be fun, I think it's reasonable to say that the failure to meet that obligation led to moral culpability if the advice seeker would have otherwise followed the good advice had it been given.
"People need to know that they have free will. Making the right decision and the intelligent decision in any given situation is the responsibility of a free person..."
And right and intelligent decisions are best made with full, accurate, complete information. When others gain the trust of a person and misrepresent themselves and circumstances, they have impaired that person's ability to make the best decision possible. Following your assertion to its logical conclusion, every person who has ever perpetrated fraud should be held blameless since their victims made poor decisions, and were responsible for making good decisions. There are some suckers out there who still fall for the Nigerian Prince scams (or the Kenyan President scams), and fail to do any due diligence. However, there are people make reasonable efforts to verify the information they are making their decisions on, and still get taken for everything.