It is the kind of holding that makes people who do not practice law shake their heads. Hiring someone to kill your business partner, a federal appeals court has decided, is not necessarily a "crime of violence." The explanation is not a loophole for the guilty so much as a lesson in how narrowly the law defines its terms.
The ruling
In a decision issued July 15, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit held that solicitation of murder-for-hire resulting in death is not categorically a "crime of violence" under the relevant federal statute. The case involved James Henrikson, a figure from the North Dakota oil boom who was convicted of orchestrating the contract killings of two associates and soliciting the murders of others. A jury found him guilty in 2016 of, among other things, four counts of solicitation to commit a crime of violence.
The appeals court concluded those four convictions cannot stand. It affirmed a lower court's decision to vacate two of them and ordered the remaining two vacated as well, as the Los Angeles Times reported. Henrikson's underlying life sentences rest on other convictions and are not erased by the ruling.
Why it is not as crazy as it sounds
The result turns on what courts call the "categorical approach." When deciding whether a past offense counts as a "crime of violence," judges do not look at what the defendant actually did. Instead, they compare the elements the statute requires against a generic legal definition. A crime of violence, under that definition, must involve the use, attempted use or threatened use of physical force.
The murder-for-hire statute is broader and, in one key respect, looser than that. As the court reasoned, its "death results" provision carries no requirement that the defendant intend for death to occur, no mens rea, in the legal shorthand. Because the statute can be satisfied without that culpable mental state, and without the defendant ever personally using force, it does not fit the narrow, generic definition of a violent crime. The mismatch, not the morality, decides the question.
Why it matters beyond one defendant
This is not merely academic. Whether an offense qualifies as a "crime of violence" can add years to a sentence and can trigger severe immigration consequences, including deportation. The 9th Circuit, whose rulings govern federal courts across California and much of the West, has over the years steadily narrowed the category through decisions like this one. Each such ruling reshapes which past crimes can be used to enhance a sentence or to remove a noncitizen.
The Henrikson decision does not suggest that arranging a murder is anything less than grave; the crime still carries up to life in prison. What it shows is the peculiar machinery of federal sentencing law, in which the label attached to a crime can hinge less on the horror of the act than on the precise words Congress used to define it. To a layperson, it reads as a contradiction. To the court, it was simply the statute doing what it says, and not what it doesn't.
