The worse your crime is, the less likely the punishment might be permadeath; We've never killed someone for actual premeditated murder. I know this is horribly inaccurate and not something to rely on- but it's entertaining that the stats support it.
Yeah, I mean, look at Stacy or Xan, both accomplished mass murderers and dangers to society, but people just look at their crimes and go "oh, look at them go, dohohoho!" Cog piledrived poor Floki to death for taking the TV remote, but he had way more missions than him, plus the incident was way too hilarious to punish. Meanwhile, Travis kills a guy who was attacking him with an actual deadly weapon (a Crystalline Projector, if I reckon rightly) in self defense due to an overshot (not even his fault, really, considering he didn't even know that Buckler the Murderdog was so good at murder), at which point Jim decides Buckler is way OP and tries to kill him, doesn't too much of a quality job, at which point hostilities escalate and Simus gets half blown up as collateral damage.
It's not the
crime that's being punished, strictly speaking, it's how insufferably you go about it. If you hilariously murder a guy nobody cares about over a TV remote and spawn a good story to tell, good on you. If you happen to kill a person nobody cares about in self defense and then act paranoid and hostile about it, you're going down.
So, as long as Lerman keeps a stiff upper lip, pinky-swears never to misbehave again (in a charming and seemingly sincere manner, preferably) and lets the reality that Kyle's guts exploding into bits was actually kind of funny, that he fell victim to unpredictable circumstance first and foremost and that D'usse had a good one liner out of the experience sink in, he should be pretty much off the hook. Though maybe not anymore now that the principle's been explained. But who knows!