More on the UK Contract Killer

Our friend Andrew Tettenborn (Exeter) writes with a different take on the contract killer case reported below:

It might be worth pointing out that, in reporting the case of the would-be English suicide who got back £2,000 from the dishonest hitman provider, The Times has (not for the first time) got its legal knickers in a twist. This wasn’t in any way an action for a breach of contract, but a criminal prosecution for fraud. And it succeeded on perfectly orthodox grounds. Just as I am guilty of fraud if I get £2,000 from you in exchange for crack cocaine which I don’t actually have and know I can’t provide, so also with obtaining money to have you illegally killed.

If Mrs Ryder had brought a civil suit for breach of contract, she would undoubtedly have lost (there’s a nice C17 case, Allen v Rescous (1676) 2 Levinz 174, dismissing an action by a disgruntled plaintiff who’d paid the defendant £1 to have someone beaten up and then complained the job hadn’t been done). So also, I suspect, a civil action in tort for fraud would have failed, on the basis that it was an indirect attempt to enforce an outrageously illegal contract.

The reason the plaintiff here got her £2,000 was that a criminal court in England has statutory jurisdiction to order a convicted defendant to compensate his victim. Perhaps oddly, it is well established that this exists even where there would be no civil liability.

[Frank Snyder]