Civil law
According to your statement that the Sanhedrin simultaneously has civil judicial authority, why didn’t Shimon ben Shetach use the legal authority to kill?
Shimon ben Shetach I will see with comfort if I did not see someone running after his friend into the ruins and I ran after him and saw a sword in his hand and his blood dripping and the slain man fluttering and I said to him, “Wicked man, who killed this man, me or you?” But what can I do, your blood is not in my hands, for the Torah says ( Deuteronomy 17:6 ) that according to two witnesses, the dead man will be put to death, and the one who knows his thoughts will repay the man who killed his friend. They said, “They did not move from there until a snake came and bit him and he died.”
I didn’t understand the question.
The Gemara states that because there were no two witnesses and a warning, he said he could not kill him. But you yourself wrote in your book that in parallel with religious law, there is civil law that can and should be used. Why didn't he use civil law to kill the murderer?
This has nothing to do with what I said. All the poskim say that beatings and punishments are unlawful in the Jewish courts. This is also ruled in the Shulchan Shulchan Shulchan. So you can ask according to everyone.
The answer probably lies in local considerations. The question is whether it was right to act in this way at the time or not, for all sorts of reasons.
It is possible to say that it is not at all unlikely that if Nachash had not come, Rabbi Shimon ben Shetach would have acted to punish the murderer unjustly.
And it is also possible to suggest that Rabbi Shimon ben Shetach did not want to act himself to punish this murderer in accordance with the explanation in the Gemara that in the law of persons there is no judge until he becomes a judge "a judge who has been forced to kill a person, a judge who has not been ordered to give him a right". And also to convey to the other dayanim his concern because as the head of the Sanhedrin it is like opening a big deal and fearing, as the Maimonides says, "lest the others trust his opinion and do not see themselves worthy of disagreeing with him". Although these rules are laws from the Torah (which came from a lecture), the explanation underlying them is general.
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