Everything you wrote is great in theory, but real life doesn’t always work out that way due to human nature.
Say, hypothetically, I walk into my seven year old daughter’s room late at night and find a strange man curled up in her bed. It could be a molester or it could be a Robert Downey Jr. situation of a druggie who was so out of his mind that he found his way into my daughter’s bed, but was otherwise harmless. Upon finding the strange adult man in my young daughter’s bed in the middle of the night should I inquire about the man’s intent and only attack upon finding he had bad intentions or should I physically intervene immediately? Human nature, as a dad, is to physically intervene immediately. If I go a little too far in that physical attack I’m not going to feel bad about it because I never would have attacked the intruder but for him being in my daughter’s room. The intruder put himself in that position.
Hood put himself in a position where a crowd had good reason to believe he was abducting three young children from that community. Even if Hood’s intent was only to steal a car he put himself in a position where child abductor was a reasonable perception of him. What Hood was going to do with those children was unknown, but to that crowd in that moment murder or rape were within the realm of possibility and that fired them up to help subdue him.
From there mob mentality took over. Individual responsibility for what happened to Hood was diffused throughout the crowd, and people didn’t appreciate the cumulative effect of their individual blows leading to Hood’s death. That’s the danger of mob violence. But for Hood’s own actions, however, he’s not in a position where the mob mentality of human nature would have manifested itself.
Sure, the District Attorney can go ahead and charge the father for taking it too far in the Heat of Passion or members of the crowd for taking it too far in aiding him, but the prosecutor is going to have a hell of a time getting a conviction for an unsympathetic “victim”.
And I don’t see the father or crowd as ignorant. I see them as just reacting. Someone with full knowledge of the law may still have acted in a similar fashion under the circumstances.