Late to jump in here. Not preaching or anything, but the truly moral and ethical way to deal with the undersized but mortally wounded fish is to throw it back (as the law demands) but also count it towards your limit. In other words, to consider your daily limit as the number of fish killed - not just how many taken home.
This is sport fishing, not subsistence fishing. For most of us, anyway.
Kind of like wounding an animal on a hunt only to never find it? Tag filled, right.
