More recent scholars contend that any criminal act tears at our social and moral fabric.
This is the reason that in criminal trials, it is the state versus the defendant, because the state represents everyone else in society. This makes sense for several reasons, one of them being that dead people cannot bring charges against someone. Furthermore, criminal law can either be substantive or procedural. Substantive deals with the criminal act and subsequent punishment, on the other hand, procedural law pertains to the actual procedure of the criminal trial. For example, when over-zealous police officers violate our rights.