Appellate Judge Decries How-to-Kill Book

RICHMOND, Va. — A U.S. appeals court judge hearing arguments Wednesday disputed the notion that a how-to-murder manual is protected as free speech, saying that the book not only instructs would-be murderers but is “an incitement to kill people.”

Judge J. Michael Luttig, a prominent conservative, made it clear that he had closely read the 130-page book “Hit Man: A Technical Manual for Independent Contractors” that is at the center of a lawsuit. “From start to finish, it is an incitement. It exhorts people to take the law into their own hands and to steel themselves to kill people,” said Luttig, whose father was murdered three years ago during a carjacking outside his Tyler, Texas, home.

Luttig and two other judges will decide whether a publisher based in Boulder, Colo., can be held liable for a triple murder.

The sisters of one of the victims sued Paladin Press, publishers of “Hit Man,” after they learned that a hired killer had used the book in the 1993 murders in Maryland. Last year a federal judge threw out their suit before a trial, on 1st Amendment grounds. Their appeal was heard Wednesday by the three-judge panel of the U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals.

The “Hit Man” case, known as Rice vs. Paladin Enterprises, has put a spotlight on the availability of “how-to” books involving bombs, poison gas and other weapons of mass killing.

Paladin Press has also figured in the Oklahoma City bombing trial. Prosecutors revealed last week that defendant Timothy J. McVeigh had purchased three books from the company, including a bomb-making book entitled “Homemade C-4.”

In its catalog, Paladin advertises the C-4 book as ideal for “when you need something more powerful than commercial dynamite or common improvised explosives.” Prosecutors in the McVeigh case noted that it contained a chapter on ammonium nitrate, the fertilizer used in the 1995 truck bombing of the federal office building in Oklahoma City that killed 168 people.

In the “Hit Man” case, both the hired killer, James Perry of Detroit, and the man he was working for, out-of-work Hollywood sound engineer Lawrence Horn, have been convicted in connection with the murders. Horn wanted his ex-wife and their brain-damaged son killed so he could inherit a $2-million trust fund intended for the boy. Perry suffocated the boy and shot the ex-wife, as well as an overnight nurse.

At Wednesday’s hearing, a lawyer representing Paladin urged the appeals court to rule that the 1st Amendment shields the publisher from all liability.

“This case involves a plaintiff for the first time trying to hold a publisher liable for the actions of one of his readers,” said Thomas B. Kelley, a Denver lawyer. The “Hit Man” was “published for mass distribution,” he said, and Paladin had no way to know whether it is “put to legal or illegal uses.”

Kelley also discounted “Hit Man” as a serious book. It is “sophomoric in places” and in other spots “reads like a Tom Clancy novel,” he said. “There are signals the book is about adventure and fantasy.”

“You think this is an adventure novel?” asked Judge Karen J. Williams, obviously skeptical.

“Well, it has some of the same characteristics,” he replied.

The mail-order book includes advice on the best guns for killing people, on how serial numbers can be removed from a weapon and how a disposable silencer can be attached. In its catalog, Paladin lauds the book as about “a professional killer [who] is a last recourse in these times when laws are so twisted that justice goes unserved. He is a man who feels no twinge of guilt at doing his job.”

After the World Trade Center bombing in New York in 1993, investigators found that the perpetrators had bomb-making information that “had been copied from books written and printed in the United States and available for purchases from publishers like Palladin Press.”