On the primacy of punishment over restitution read this.
It is necessary to keep in mind the difference between employing the theory (de jure) versus the execution of law (de facto). Even if a judicial firm refuses to assign capital punishment, it would have to guess at what sort of agreement for restitution the 2 parties would come to as if it might kill a murderer.
Anyhow, being an accident doesn’t make the proper punishment (in theory) anything less than the criminal owing 1 life.
This is the “(one or) two teeth for a tooth” aspect of proportionality theory (from page 12). Consider a case where A (who suffers from narcolepsy) nods off and runs over B’s $500 bike along the road. We’ll assume that A woke up and sorted the whole thing out rather than trying to escape and that B was sitting comfortably on his porch when he saw it happen, so that the other aspects of proportionality are held constant.
What we do then is sort of pretend to turn the hands of time backwards and see what actions will rectify the situation. One tooth is looking at the victim and one is looking at the criminal. We’ll assign one tooth (the $500 bike) which was destroyed to be returned to the victim. This isn’t a question of blame though. When I have time I will go into greater detail on this, but basically: In any type of social interaction which we could call “in sight of the law” there is, as a matter of a priori necessity:
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A certain mental attitude by a person
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Concomitant action by the person
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An objective state of affairs or the external physical interaction
Regarding (1), what differentiates “murder” from “manslaughter” in most every legal schema is the mental process of premeditation existing in the former and lacking in the latter.
Then with regards to the bike case, A didn’t intentionally bring about the external results, so when the actions are to be “reversed” B cannot act without license of A’s original intent.