Accidents happen, and people get killed. The responsible party pays damages. This happens every day, and if it happens to us, we all hope the guy who kills our family member is not an Obama voter or illegal alien with no assets and no insurance.
How much a life is worth is a difficult question. In principle, the affluence of the victim and/or the size or wealth of the perpetrator should not factor into it. It does, of course, but in principle I would like to think that your life, or mine, is as valuable as Bill Gates' life in a wrongful death suit arising from an automobile accident.
I have for some years proposed two hypothetical but clarifying remedies when this discussion arises.
(1) Suppose we let people -- all of us -- value our own lives as we see fit. After all, we do this already, and voluntarily, through the life insurance that we choose to carry. This is a precise measure of the value we place on our own lives when we are paying the premiums ourselves. So let's have a rule that in a wrongful death suit, the next of kin can recover an amount equal to the deceased person's life insurance. Not a penny more.
(2) Alternatively, let's impose a cosmic justice rule, and say that everyone's life in such a case is worth $10 million (or pick your own figure). If that's the standard, that would then become the amount of liability insurance everyone would have to carry before driving a car, or engaging in any other activity that might cause a wrongful accidental death.
We don't think of these cases in such terms because of the optics: in this case, a big truck, which is scary; an employee of a big and presumptively evil company; and a trial lawyer who graduated from the John Edwards sobbing school. This turn the whole thing into a jackpot, which is a profound corruption that we've been living with for many years.
WalMart should be liable for whatever a generic wrongful automobile accident death is worth -- e.g., what you would pay if you accidentally killed someone this afternoon, and it was your fault. To expand the judgment beyond that, one would have to show negligence on the part of the company, and that's where a reasonable limit to an employer's responsibility for the off-work activities of employees comes into play.
So, by your theory people who kill small children are the least culpable? By your theory small children’s lives have no value, because, hey, how often do children have life insurance?
Every life is worth the same. However, the monetary value can vary greatly depending on a number of factors of the victim.
A person who generates $500,000 in income has a much greater financial value than someone who makes $50,000.