When Mrs. Peters says that the law must punish crime, Mrs. Hale replies:

I wish you'd seen Minnie Foster when she wore a white dress with blue ribbons and stood up there in the choir and sang...Oh, I wish I'd come over here once in a while! That was a crime! That was a crime! Who's going to punish that?

These statements represent the two principal views of guilt and innocence in the play. Mrs. Peters here speaks for the men and the law. John Wright has been murdered and his murderer must be brought to justice. Mrs. Hale, however, is concerned with moral guilt and innocence. She remembers Minnie's innocence before she was married and thinks how she must have suffered from being married to a brute. She counts herself as guilty for not supporting and helping Minnie. If that was a crime, then naturally the crime of the man who abused her was all the greater.

At the end of the play, it seems clear both that Mrs. Wright is legally guilty of murdering her husband and that she will escape punishment under the law because Henderson and Peters will never discover this guilt. Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters agree that John Wright was morally guilty and his wife acted in self-defence against his abuse.