Hiring a hit man to commit murder is not always ‘a crime of violence,’ 9th Circuit rules

Hiring a hit man is not a crime of violence, even in cases where the killer fulfills his contract and his employer is convicted in the conspiracy, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled this week.

In a unanimous decision, a three-judge panel vacated two felony convictions that stemmed from a pair of contract killings negotiated to settle an oil well dispute in North Dakota.

The court found that although trucking and drilling magnate James Henrikson had paid Timothy Suckow tens of thousands of dollars to beat one of his employees to death with a tire jack and shoot a co-investor at home, “solicitation” of those crimes did not meet the legal threshold for violence, even if fatal violence flowed from the deal.

The judges argued that under the current federal statute, “a defendant may be convicted … based on an accidental killing.” Evidence of the conspirators’ intent to use force was legally essential to a conviction, the court ruled.

A lower court had already tossed two related convictions because additional hits Henrikson ordered from a different contractor were never carried out.

The appeals court went further, saying even soliciting a successful hit is “not categorically a crime of violence.”

The ruling turns on the concept of mens rea, Latin for “guilty mind,” a legal term used to differentiate crimes such as premeditated murder and involuntary manslaughter, which is a charge used when authorities believe a killing was unintentional.

Contracting a murder might seem to be the very definition of a guilty-minded crime. But the way the federal solicitation statute is written, convicting it doesn’t require proof the hit man actually intended the target to die — only that it happened after the person who commissioned the job took necessary steps to assure their target’s demise.

The court gave an example: A person who “lures the intended victim into his car, and then negligently (or even non-negligently) causes a crash that kills the intended victim.” Such a scenario would satisfy “the ‘if death results’ element of the offense” that is required for a conviction, the panel wrote.

The decision puts the 9th Circuit at odds with the 4th, which ruled just the opposite in a similar case five years ago.

“If a defendant willingly agrees to enter into a conspiracy with the specific intent that a murder be committed for money and death results from that agreement, it follows that the defendant acted with specific intent to bring about the death of the conspiracy’s victim,” the 4th Circuit ruled in a different murder-for-hire case in 2021.

The 9th Circuit brushed aside that logic, saying the Supreme Court had since struck down a key legal tenet of that case. The West Coast appellate judges said it was “inappropriate” to extrapolate intent from one element of the crime, such as making a contract, to another, like the agreed-upon death.

In theory, the decision knocks years off Henrikson’s sentence. But because he is already serving two consecutive life sentences for related crimes, it will not alter the amount of time he spends in prison.