Contract killing
Form of murder
Contract killing, sometimes known as murder-for-hire, refers to the act in which one party employs another party to murder a targeted person via an illegal agreement that involves some form of compensation, monetary or otherwise. An act of contract killing is known colloquially as a hit, and the person performing the killing (i.e. the contract killer or "contractor") is known as the hitman or (as borrowed from Spanish) "sicario".
01Statistics
Contract killings generally make up a small percentage of murders. For example, they accounted for about 6% of all murders in Scotland from 1993 to 2002. Despite the popular attention in the media, the act of contract killing received very little attention in the academic literature.
With contract killing, there is a party that sees contract killing as the only solution, searches for and recruits a hitman through personal networks or by approaching a professional, and then makes concrete agreements about method and payment.
A study by the Australian Institute of Criminology of 162 contract murders and attempted contract murders in Australia between 1989 and 2002 indicated that the most common reason for murder-for-hire was insurance policy payouts. The study also found that payments varied from $5,000 to $30,000 per killing, with an average of $15,000, and that the most commonly used weapons were firearms. Contract killings accounted for 2% of murders in Australia during that period.
To mitigate risk for the individual seeking a hitman, and signal legitimacy, vendors emphasize privacy and anonymity while claiming ties to established organizations like the military or mafia.
A paper by Calhoun (2010) argues that legal execution and killing in war are not morally different from many acts called “murder,” especially considering the understanding of the third party of what they are doing. Calhoun states that common distinction between legal and illegal killing has no real moral basis.
Sources and credits
This article is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Contract killing”, written by its contributors and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Fathomly has changed the layout, removed citation markers, navigation and maintenance notices, and adjusted punctuation. This adapted version is shared under the same license. For references, see the original article.
Images, from Wikimedia Commons:
- Jean Louis Ernest Meissonier (1815-1891) - The Hired Assassins (Les Bravi) - P327 - The Wallace Collection.jpg by Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier, Public domain
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