In criminal law, guilt is the state of being responsible for the commission of an offense. Legal guilt is entirely externally defined by the state, or more generally a "court of law". Being "guilty" of a criminal offense means that one has committed a violation of criminal law, or performed all the elements of the offense set out by a criminal statute. The determination that one has committed that violation is made by an external body and is, therefore, as definitive as the record-keeping of the body. So the most basic definition is fundamentally circular: a person is guilty of violatinga law, if a court says so. Philosophically, guilt in criminal law is a reflection of a functioning society and its ability to condemn individuals' actions. It rests fundamentally on a presumption of free will, in which individuals choose actions and are, therefore, subjected to external judgement of the rightness or wrongness of those actions.
"Guilt" is the obligation of a person who has violated a moral standard to bear the sanctions imposed by that moral standard. In legal terms, guilt means having been found to have violated a criminal law, though law also raises 'the issue of defences, pleas, the mitigation of offences, and the defeasibility of claims'. Les Parrottdraws a three-fold distinction between "objective or legal guilt, which occurs when society's laws have been broken... social guilt... an unwritten law of social expectation", and finally the way "personal guilt occurs when someone compromises one's own standards".
Remedies
Guilt can sometimes be remedied by: punishment ; forgiveness ; making amends, or "restitution ... an important step in findingfreedom from real guilt'; or by sincere remorse. Guilt can also be remedied through intellectualisation or cognition . Helping other people can also help relieve guilt feelings: "thus guilty people are often helpful people ... helping, like receiving an external reward, seemed to get people feeling better". There are also the so-called "Don Juans of achievement ... who pay the installments due their superego not by suffering but by achievements.... Since no achievement succeeds in really undoingthe unconscious guilt, these persons are compelled to run from one achievement to another". Law does not usually accept the agent's self-punishment, but some ancient codes did: in Athens, the accused could propose their own remedy, which could, in fact, be a reward, while the proposed another, and the jury chose something in-between. This forced the accused to effectively bet on his support in the community, as Socrates did when he proposed "room and board in the town hall" as his fate. He lost and drank hemlock, a poison, as advised by his accuser.
