Selling the right to kill one's convicted abuser: how could an NGO make this profitable?

Question

A free-market solution to preventing further domestic abuse

This society has gone full-on free-market everything including the punishment of severe domestic abuse. As a check on the abuser, the abused is granted a perpetual (or very long, 20 years or so) murder-right on the abuser, and only the abuser. This murder-right is the right but not the obligation to kill the abuser at any time.

We note that the abused are frequently strongly averse to violence themselves (or they might have resorted to it earlier in their own self-defense). For this reason, the murder-right can be transferred to a third party with the stipulation that the right can only be exercised when the restraining order is broken. The murder-right and accompanying restraining order are granted by the court after the abuser is convicted of serious domestic abuse. Should the abuser restrain themselves, they have nothing to fear.

So we have an NGO that buys murder-right contracts from the abused then exercises them when needed. However, killing people is expensive. One has to keep track of them, weapons need replacing, ammo isn't cheap, legal retainer fees add up quickly...and good sociopaths are hard to come by. This NGO needs to make money and lots of it.

What is a viable, long term business model for this NGO and how do they make a profit? The NGO must pay the abused for their murder-right in a one-time payment. It should also be resistant to bribery by a very rich-abuser (though getting paid twice is always preferable).

Out of scope

• This NGO only deals with serious, long term domestic abuse. Peeping toms and other lesser offenses are just out of scope. Murder of the abused is also out of scope.
• This question does not deal with defining processes for determining if a restraining order has been violated. A magic oracle determines if the order has been violated or not.
• This question does not deal with determining exact definitions or gradations or styles of domestic abuse. This question only cares about 'serious domestic abuse'
• How the abuser is killed is out of scope unless the method for death somehow makes money for the NGO.
• How an abuser might protect themselves from this NGO unless those protection measures are means of income for the NGO.
• While it's likely that there would be more than one NGO, this question only addresses the business model of a single NGO. Describing market dynamics between multiple NGOs is a separate question altogether.
• Proposal for a different market system for dealing with market abuse is also out of scope.

Note to downvoters, if you would be so good as to explain why you're downvoting, that'd be really helpful, thank you.

Further Reading:

• PRIVATE CREATION AND ENFORCEMENT OF LAW: A HISTORICAL CASE - A description of a heavily market driven approach to the punishment of murder.

Answer 1

Live-Streaming

Have you ever heard of Twitch? The streaming platform that allows you to let other people watch you play a game and give you donations if they like to watch you play? Where hundred or thousands of people watch as you are playing live?

The streaming platform where you, as a person sitting in front of your PC at home, can watch virtual characters be blast to bits, cut up or be killed in innumerous other ways?

You can simply adapt their concept to your world and have people pay to watch the execution. It's full-on-free-market after all, so why not make some money with the execution? Depending on the restraining orders you would have different executions, making it more... varied... for the people watching.

You could even expand this. Once the magical oracle tells you that someone can be killed without any consequences you can start the live stream. You don't need a lot from each one watching - just a little donation every now and then, maybe a subscription service for less advertisement on the site and access to background checks of the former abusers, ... silver and gold memberships to have increased voting rights when it comes to execution methods, different camera angles, ...

And now, Ladies and Gentlemen, we will start the tracking. Let's look at the cameras around his house first and see if we can find our first clues as to his whereabouts.

In the next room my assistant is starting to prepare the execution method. Switch to camera three to follow him or stay with me to see how we find this one. We have a great assortment this time! It will take some time to find him and that's why it will also take some time to finish him - you know the drill.

For a recap about the history of this one you could switch to camera two, where we have detailed all important stuff. Everything, from birth to soon-to-be death!

Leave comments to have a chance for a T-Shirt if we choose your little torture trick before killing him. As always: have fun! And don't forget to donate - we need the money to help the poor victims of domestic abuse get their well-deserved revenge and to help them with their mental therapy afterwards.

Afterwards you could sell the tools used in the tortur-... production of the stream as "Limited Edition" stuff. And the platform could be licensed to others who may want to stream... unconventional... stuff...

Answer 2

In addition to the other ideas: sell organs. Kidneys, heart, bone-marrow, skin. What's left goes to the catfood factory.

Answer 3

The NGO could auction off the rights themselves to the highest bidder once the restraining order terms are violated. There are likely people who would pay to be able to hunt a human legally, especially if there are no limits on how it's done, assuming that only the abuser is hurt.

Another source of income is trophies and footage. Once again there are likely people who would pay for memorabilia from abusers who have been assassinated, or for snuff films.

One way to make it more resistant to bribery is to have a somewhat transparent process, and having multiple NGOs.
You want transparency, because if the right just disappears from the list someone should know. And having multiple NGOs means that if one is shown to be dishonest then people won't choose to do business with them. If the person who wins the bid is kept confidential, then it makes it slightly harder for a rich abuser to bribe them.
Also, all contracts should have a time limit. If a violation happens, the NGO has X amount of time to bid it off. Once it is bid off, the assassin has X amount of time to carry it out before they lose the right, and then bidding happens again. If the assassin fails, then bidding starts again.
This way there is some assurance that justice will be done, as you can't pay off everyone.
If the NGO fails to get the job done in a certain amount of time, then it goes to another NGO.

Answer 4

Hunting Safari

They sell hunting safari for wealthy gentlemen that grew bored of shooting lions. They will go abuser-hunting now, and will likely pay a little fortune for that.

Once an abuser break the restraining order, the NGO takes its client to the neighbourhood, provide them with guns and a picture of the abusers and let’s go!

Of course, they will also organize back-up and picnic, so the wealthy hunter is not killed by the prey and doesn’t get thirsty.

Answer 5

Maybe nobody wants to go there but . . . the most obvious answer is . . .

Slavery

Honestly, I don't know how this answer has been missed with so many answers here . . . but if you have the legal ability to kill a person, it's fairly obvious you have a right to not kill them, provisionally. In this case you have de facto slavery. As long as the abused has the right to kill a person however or whenever they want, all they have to do is say "I won't kill or torture you now provided you do X, Y, and Z." Most people have enough desire to live (or not be tortured to death!) that this will motivate the typical abuser. This obviously has the potential to bring the abused down to the level of the abuser, but if you are simply looking for a way to make a profit . . . slavery is profitable. Immoral and reprehensible, of course, but profitable.

Answer 6

The trick here is to be paid twice for the same job.

Abuser elimination as a service

The first question is as follows, what went wrong in your market that the NGO is buying the rights when they should either be being paid for the service of removing the person in question or accepting a contract to remove the person pro bono publico? The victim should be paying the organisation, not the other way round.

After that it's just a matter of selling the right to legally kill someone into a suitably sociopathic market. One person removed, two paychecks.

Depending on the culture, you can now add other options. Battle Royale for example, all the targets are rounded up, placed on an island and the survivor after a week gets to live (at least long enough for the post production interviews). Television rights provide the funding.

The Running Man, again a TV game with the winner getting a tropical island holiday (there are never any winners).

There are any number of ways of making money out of televising the hunt.

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Let's consider some nice dystopian price schemes

Free

One could call this pro-bono, but it's more Jerry Springer, you could go as far as paying an appearance fee in this case. Nobody is interested in seeing some random person fighting to the death in an arena, they need a story, a reason to be involved. The victim has to go on screen and tell the world what happened and why they're using this option.

Freemium

There's a cost to being anonymous, a cost to hiring an actor to tell the story rather than having to do it in person. You can pay for anything on the scale from here to:

Executive premium

There's only one paycheck for this one and that's from the victim. There was an abuser yesterday, today there isn't. No word, no sign, no body, just gone.

Answer 7

If you want to be cynical, how about re-selling the murder right, at a tidy profit, to the abuser himself? You get paid, the victim gets paid, the abuser gets to be safe, . . . everybody wins!

Answer 8

The most obvious opportunity for profit would be for the NGO to accept payments from non-abused parties to fulfill the murder.

So let's say I want to kill my boss, and my boss is an abuser who the NGO has the murder-right on. I'm willing to pay the NGO 1 million dollars to fulfill that murder.

But as soon as this enters the equation, the abuser is being murdered for non-abuse reasons, since only the murder right is transferable, not the murder reason. A separate case could (and should) be filed against me for conspiracy to commit murder, and I wouldn't be able to claim domestic abuse.

The only assumption we are making in this scenario is that an abused's right to murder their abuser is transferable. Just because this very dark assumption is true in this scenario does not imply that any other dark assumptions can be made. We assume the NGO must be able to profit from this murder in a legal way. I will accept the assumption that being able to sell your murder-right means that the murder-right can be legally purchased, and thus the murder itself would be legal, but I would limit that assumption to the murdering of the abuser in a pre-determined "legal" way, such as the murder being done in a way that would be deemed ethically and morally sound.

A starting off point for what "legal ethical" murder would look is the Geneva convention and other global military agreements on warfare. This means the abuser can't be tortured, can't be treated in a cruel or unusual way, can't be killed via biochemical agents (like sarin or anthrax, etc).

I would say that live-streaming isn't an option because for one it would violate the abuser's right to privacy (which they would maintain before and after death, like anyone else), and it would probably violate laws regarding creating a violent scenario for the purpose of profit, something along the lines of what makes Bum Fights potentially illegal. If we assume a world where public execution is reintroduced, I would argue that it has been reintroduced as a right for anyone to attend an execution, making it some sort of public service, and thus not something you could make prohibitive to attend by charging money. If we think of it like airwaves as being a public good, at best someone might profit from filming the event and providing access to that stream, but that wouldn't be the NGO (directly) but more like YouTube or ABC (it would be a media market, not a direct "we kill em, you pay us to watch us kill em" market).

As for making it an auction on who gets to kill the abuser, I would argue that if the murder-right is transferable but expected to be done ethically, that those committing said murder would likely need some form of licensing, demonstrating they are capable and qualified, etc. We are letting these people commit legal murder, so they need to be registered in some way to do this. This would also rule out the "human safari" idea, as it should. If we introduce some sort of Running Man scenario where anyone who sees the abuser can kill them, we open the door to a lot of liability. We have no assurance that the murderer will murder the abuser in an effective way (what if they just maim them, and the abuser runs off, does that person get away with stabbing someone in the leg just because the person was an abuser? And how can we know for sure that people wouldn't pay just to "try to kill" the person, with no good faith that they will actually do so?)

So if the person is licensed to murder, we're looking at a sort of Uber for murdering. The NGO is the company that buys the rights to murder, the murderer is a free-agent licensed by the state to facilitate said murder. Which sounds like something people would register for to make money, not to pay for the privilege of murdering someone.

Harvesting organs is a clever idea, but would still require a law that made it legal to do so. Otherwise the abuser still has the rights to their organs and what is done with them when they die.

The most obvious opportunity for profit, with all of the above taken into consideration, would be via a life insurance policy. Something similar to companies that exist now that buy life insurance policies from people (especially the sick or elderly) and pay them a lump sum percentage of the policy now and change the company to the benefactor.

This wouldn't count as insurance fraud (though it may drive up insurance premiums on high-risk policies, like where the person is a likely abuser) any more than buying the life insurance policy from someone with terminal cancer. Because the NGO only fulfills the murder if some restraining order is violated, they aren't the agents of the life insurance policy becoming effective, the violation of that restraining order is what killed the abuser, the NGO simply implemented said death upon violation of that restraining order.

But I imagine this would require the abused to be the benefactor of the policy as well as having the right to change the benefactor to the NGO. In other words, the policy would be one that the abuser didn't have any control over. If the policy has to exist in advance for this to not be considered insurance fraud (buying a policy knowing that there is a high likelihood of a very-soon death would be expensive, and not disclosing this would be fraud), this could also be tricky. The abuser would essentially have to have already gotten such a policy before discovering the abuser was actually an abuser (maybe some sort of pre-nup type thing).

This model would also work (albeit very slowly over time) because the NGO would profit whenever the abuser dies, even if they never violate the restraining order. If they have a heart attack or get murdered by their current spouse (who they are certainly also abusing), or just walk in front of a bus one day, they die, the policy pays out to the beneficiary, the NGO.

Aside from all that, the NGO could potentially profit from media rights to the story itself. They are not only buying the murder-right to murder the abuser, but the right to profit from any media based on the abusive relationship, the murder itself, etc. Things like selling books, T-shirts, made-for-tv movie scripts, etc. I don't know how much that would be worth, but the underlying idea being that the NGO could find vectors beyond the murder itself to profit from, assuming they buy them at the same time as the murder-right. What else does the abused have of value beyond the murder-right is the question.

Answer 9

Crowd Funding

When the NGO hears of an abuse victim who might be willing to sell their murder rights, they don't buy the rights immediately. They instead collect all the evidence about the abuse case and present it in the most sensationalist way possible. They then go on social media and start a viral campaign where they ask people for donations to buy the murder rights and bring the abuser to justice.

The goals for their fundraising campaigns will usually exceed the price of the murder rights and the reward for the assassin. The difference is "administrative overhead" which goes to the organization itself and provides a modest salary for the organizers.

The organization might be susceptible to corruption in form of overstating how bad their targets really are. They might falsify evidence in order to get more money out of their donors or greatly overestimate the actual cost of the murder rights and the assassination to improve their profit margin. But it would be very difficult for the targets to bribe them after the campaign has started. When a funding is successful and the perpetrator keeps on living, the organization will lose its credibility. They can be sure that nobody who backed the assassination of this person will ever back them again. So they are very unlikely to strike such a deal.

Answer 10

There seem to be several income sources. I'm going to shotgun them rather than flesh out any specific one too much:

1) The abused: The abused could pay for the privledge of being protected by the NGO, either in dollars or labor.

2) The public: They could pay to watch the killings. Especially if the killings are done in a 'sporting' fashion (like "The Deadliest Game" or "Abuser vs. Lions" or "Death Race") a lot of revenue can be generated.

2a) Gambling on the outcome.

2b) Sponsors/ad revenue. Esp. if there are competing teams each sponsored by a different company (or companies) like NASCAR.

3) The public: It's possible if the NGO is also a non-profit, that they can solict sufficent donations. I would expect a lot of the abuseds' stories would be useful fundraising tools.

4) The sick: If the rights go beyond simply murder, to ownership of the body, and selling organs is legal, the organs would be source of income.

5) Psychopaths: Killing a person may be a ultimate hunting trophy. People might bid on the opportunity to be the executioner. Especially if combined with a sporting aspect like (2) where it's a contest.

6) Dangerous Services: Maybe there are very dangerous things that abusers could do to possibly live (or pass on a percent of the fee to their heirs) that the NGO could charge money for. Like, a drug company pays the NGO to let the people who are marked for death try 'X'.

7) The abusers: In the US, parolees often have to pay to be on parole. Maybe the abusers have to pay for their own monitoring. (Possibly pro-rated on income?) It's pretty contraversial in the US now...

Answer 11

A human body is worth about ca 230 grand in grand organs harvested from dead plus blood, bone marrow etc... up to 45 million if you harvest every bit and piece. Yes, if you keep the human body mainly intact, butchering it and selling it piecemeal can make a hefty sum. So if the NGO buying hit contracts would get into sole posession of the offender's body, it could make a nice sum just by taking the fresh bodies and stripping them of their organs to be implanted all over the country. After all, it is 'total free market' and everything can be sold.

For the stuff that can't be sold via the organ trade... The NGO might produce Soylent Green.

Answer 12

I can see death match TV becoming a really big thing.

Think Big Brother where the housemate gets wood chipped instead of getting kicked out and everything the housemates do to entertain us as not to get voted out.

Think American Ninja with spikes, grinders and acid pools.

The Running Man by Stephen King was very much like this. The TV network had a whole raft of fatal TV shows of which the Running Man was the top show.

Buying the rights to someone's death would be big big business.

Answer 13

Simple Rules of Plunder

If the abuser violates the terms of the restraining order they die and everything that they own passes into the ownership of the NGO. With that kind of transferal of assets, the NGO should be able to support itself for a long time.

However, this approach raises another problem of wealth concentration in the hands of the NGO but that's a different question.

Answer 14

The situation you suggest almost sounds like the abused files for abuse and then files a restraining order but then continues to live with or nearby the abuser. I'm not suggesting it does not happen in real life and I don't want to diminish those people or situations that do, but for the most part once a restraining order has been granted then the majority (Not all, and many more never even reach this stage, but majority) tend to keep separated without further abuse...

With that being the case in the real world, you would need to create a situation where the abused are more likely to file for this but also more likely to stay with or near the abuser, for the existence of this right, and therefore companies which profit from it to exist in the first place.

An Alternative

With that aside, possibly when an abused files for this, they are awarded by the court rather than damages from the abuser, but awarded an Abuse bounty, that is appointed by the court, to which the value is dependent on the level of abuse, this means if the abused wants the abuser killed then they are awarded the compensation, however if they do not then it is placed upon the abuser by the government , which in the event of further abuse, any registered company that manages to execute the contract, with be awarded the compensation money.

Immersion

If you wrote this into a book or film, you could put it out there as a difference to our world and have that take the effect upon the world as you see fit, however the most immersive parts of stories are where the writer mentions or references the effects those differences have had on the world in general aside from that initial difference

Think in the new Blade Runner, where the MC is surprised to find out one of the prostitutes is a real human being not a replicant, a small line thrown in, however it (mildly) suggests that replicant prostitution is either so common or potentially so much better that human prostitutes are very rare.

To use your component... situations like Legisey's or AndyD273 suggestions of wealthy people "hunting" is definitely a way that a company would look to maximize profits, or create some sort of "Battle Royale" style system where the abusers fight each other for a chance at freedom and all aired live on TV with Gambling

there would be TV shows where a talk show hosts talks to the victims of abuse about their feelings when they watch the company enact the murder, there would also be competitor companies trying to get the same profits, and hire the same sociopaths. abuse lawyers that "guarantee" to get the abused the maximum punishment bounty for the abuser "to ensure they never harm you again"

Sidenote

But also, in this world where abuse is common, these legal cases are common and staying nearby is common, why make bribery and corruption any less common, it could easily be part or an aside to the story, just look at the Facebook data scandal at the moment, where the company responsible has closed its offices and shutting down, only the CEOs of that company have another one doing the exact same line of work already, and they will probably make a few number of staff "redundant" only to hire most or all of them back, under a different name like nothing ever happened...

Is this corruption, bad business practices or just the unfortunate way modern businesses work; not all, but some at least,

Corruption exists, a world without corruption would probably have little to no abuse, they are very similar just on drastically different scales

Answer 15

In addition to all the answers above, which are great...simple extortion works too. "We own your murder contract. Pay up or lights out."

I'm envisioning something along the lines of a 10% 'tax' (to start) charged to abusers, forever, by the NGO. Variations in this rate would allow for interesting permutations in terms of 'when is it worth it to just say screw this, I'm going off grid' or 'I'll get her anyhow' or etc.

Answer 16

Sell their relatives the same rights on you, should you exercise that right.

Like any Ponzi scheme, it does have its limits...