Organized Crime In The New Millennium

In many such societies the redress was not via a legal system, but by blood revenge,
although there might also be a form of payment that could be made instead—such as
the weregild which in early Germanic society could be paid to the victim's family in lieu
of their right of revenge.
One of the oldest-known prohibitions against murder appears in the Sumerian Code of
Ur-Nammu written sometime between 2100 and 2050 BC. The code states, "If a man
commits a murder, that man must be killed."
In Judeo-Christian traditions, the
prohibition against murder is one of
the Ten Commandments given by
God to Moses in (Exodus: 20v13)
and (Deuteronomy 5v17). The
Vulgate and subsequent early
English translations of the Bible
used the term secretly killeth his
neighbor or smiteth his neighbor
secretly rather than murder for the
Latin clam percusserit proximum.
Later editions such as Young's Literal Translation and the World English Bible have
translated the Latin occides simply as murder rather than the alternatives of kill,
assassinate, fall upon, or slay.
In Islam according to the Qur'an, one of the greatest sins is to kill a human being who
has committed no fault. "For that cause We decreed for the Children of Israel that
whosoever killeth a human being for other than manslaughter or corruption in the earth,
it shall be as if he had killed all mankind, and whoso saveth the life of one, it shall be as
if he had saved the life of all mankind." "And those who cry not unto any other god along
with Allah, nor take the life which Allah hath forbidden save in (course of) justice, nor
commit adultery – and whoso doeth this shall pay the penalty."
The term assassin derives from Hashshashin, a militant Ismaili Shi'ite sect, active from
the 8th to 14th centuries. This mystic secret society killed members of the Abbasid,
Fatimid, Seljuq and Crusader elite for political and religious reasons. The Thuggee cult
that plagued India was devoted to Kali, the goddess of death and destruction. According
to some estimates the Thuggees murdered 1 million people between 1740 and 1840.
The Aztecs believed that without regular offerings of blood the sun god Huitzilopochtli
would withdraw his support for them and destroy the world as they knew it. According to
Ross Hassig, author of Aztec Warfare, "between 10,000 and 80,400 persons" were
sacrificed in the 1487 re-consecration of the Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlan.
Southern slave codes did make willful killing of a slave illegal in most cases. For
example, the 1860 Mississippi case of Oliver v. State charged the defendant with
murdering his own slave. In 1811, the wealthy white planter Arthur Hodge was hanged
for murdering several of his slaves on his plantation in the British West Indies.
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