And this is wrong. Either they harmed me or another, or they didn't. If it can not be proven, there is no recourse. If this act wasn't criminal, I could take them to "civil court". At that point, I must prove they committed the act that caused the alledged harm. I must prove what the harm is as well.
But if they hurt you deliberately, so they were facing criminal prosecution as well, your case against them would fail unless the evidence met the stricter test of proof beyond a reasonable doubt.
Yes, once convicted by a jury, beyond a reasonable doubt, you can then recover losses.
I think you misunderstood my post a little. I'm not talking about a simple "civil" suit. I am talking about an issue such as a murder where the person is tried in two different courts with two different standards of proof. If the person is acquitted of murder, there is no way that someone should be able to take them to "civil court", for the same crime, and be able to have them tried under lesser criteria. If it can not be proven that the individual murdered someone, it is not right for another court to be able to punish the person monitarily for an act that was never proven. This is the essence of being tried twice for the same crime. Because the "punishment" is different doesn't change this fact.
First, you assume that whether something has been “proven” is a simple yes or no question, that either we know it happened or we know it didn’t. But that’s not how the world works. It’s a spectrum, a matter of degree. Someone can show you proof that makes you think something probably happened, but you’re not completely sure. To imagine it in numerical terms, the evidence might make you 55% convinced, or 80% convinced, or 99.99% convinced.
Second, you are assuming that the standard of proof should be different in a civil case depending on whether a criminal case preceded it. Please realize that would be absurd. As I explained above, it would mean that you would have a harder time recovering from an intentional wrongdoer than one who was merely careless. That is backwards.
Think about an example... Suppose that Paula claims Willie sexually harassed her. It’s not a crime, but it’s something for which a person can be held civilly liable. She has enough proof of it to make a reasonable person 90% convinced that he did it. So she sues... and she wins. Because the jury is convinced by a preponderance of the evidence that he did it. Willie pays damages to compensate for hurting her.
But suppose instead that Juanita claims that Willie raped her. She has enough proof to make a reasonable person 90% convinced that he did it. The prosecutors indict Willie for raping Juanita, it goes to trial, and the jury acquits him because it is only 90% convinced of his guilt, leaving them with a reasonable doubt. So Juanita sues... and Judge FreeTally throws her case out of court. Willie gets off scot free, and doesn’t have to pay her dime, because there was a prior criminal case.
So under your theory, Juanita has proof that is just as strong as Paula’s, and suffered a far more serious injury, but she loses out because she alleges something that could constitute both a crime and a civil tort. That can't possibly be a sensible outcome.
I realize that at first glance it seems unjust that someone can face a second case after being found not guilty in the first one. But unless you want to make the standards of proof the same for civil and criminal cases (which would be silly), it's both inevitable and perfectly appropriate that some people will face civil suits regardless of the outcome of the criminal case against them.