It's the government who defines what "criminal" means.

Not necessarily. I'm free to make my own determination on the matter.

You are certainly free to make up your own definitions for words and speak a dialect that is niche but you will not be effectively communicating when you do. By commonly understood definition criminality is a matter of law.

	▲	wat10000 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Well, the dude here hasn't been put on trial, let alone convicted, as far as I can tell from the article. So he's not officially considered a criminal by a government. Yet we all seem comfortable calling him one, so I'd say that it is not, in fact, commonly understood to be exclusively a matter of law.