[1rudeboy]

You missed my point, as did the others: a private citizen may not institute a legal proceeding that results in the incarceration of another private citizen. We simply don’t have that sort of a legal system.

[Hunton Peck]

That's not true. It's OK if a criminal prosecution results from the suit, but it's an ethical violation for the lawyers to use the threat of a criminal prosecution to coerce a defendant or potential defendant into settling or some other adverse action (unless the ethical rules have changed since I was in the biz).

You don't really think that no criminal prosecution could result if a non-suspect witness in a wrongful death suit blurted out that he himself was the killer, do you?