Definition
Blood money has two distinct legal meanings that developed along separate historical tracks:
1. Compensation to victim's kin. In its oldest legal sense, blood money is a sum paid by a killer — or the killer's family or clan — to the relatives of a person who has been slain, in lieu of or in satisfaction of a claim for vengeance or civil liability. This is the legal equivalent of the Germanic weregild (man-payment), a formal system of scheduled monetary compensation that substituted organized financial settlement for cycles of retributive violence. In this sense, blood money functions as a primitive form of civil damages for wrongful death, administered through custom or tribal law rather than a court.
2. Reward for capital conviction. In a secondary, more modern sense, blood money refers to a monetary reward paid — typically by the state or by private parties — to an informant or witness whose testimony leads to the apprehension and conviction of a person charged with a capital crime. The term carries a pejorative charge in this usage, implying that the witness has, in effect, sold another person's life for profit.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Money obtained at the cost of another's life; money paid by a killer or the killer's clan to the family of the person killed.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Money paid to the next of kin of a person killed by another; money obtained as the price of another's life, including rewards for supporting a capital charge, money for betraying a fugitive, money for committing murder, or money obtained from the sale of something that will destroy the purchaser.
The common usage is broad and morally loaded, covering everything from formal compensation payments to bribery for betrayal to the proceeds of contract killing. The legal usage is narrower and splits into two distinct concepts that common usage collapses together: a legitimate system of civil-style compensation (weregild) and an evidentiary concern about the credibility and motives of paid informants. Researchers who encounter "blood money" in popular or journalistic sources should not assume the term carries a precise technical meaning without consulting context.
Common Confusion
The two legal meanings are easily conflated, and the term's emotional weight in common language makes the confusion worse. The weregild sense is historically prior and structurally resembles modern wrongful death damages — it is a payment from the responsible party to the victim's family, intended to settle a claim. The informant-reward sense flows in the opposite direction: it is a payment from a third party (the state or a private offeror) to a witness, with no compensatory function at all. A researcher reading a historical case or treatise reference to "blood money" must determine from context which meaning is operative. The two senses occasionally appear in the same source without disambiguation, as they do in both editions of Black's.
Why It Matters in Research
The term is a research trap precisely because it sounds self-explanatory. Several issues require attention:
Weregild in common law history. The weregild system was largely displaced by the Norman-influenced common law, which criminalized homicide as an offense against the Crown rather than a wrong to be settled privately between families. This transition is critical: by the time formal English common law solidified, blood money in the compensation sense had no recognized legal mechanism in most common law jurisdictions. Researchers working with Anglo-Saxon legal sources or early medieval texts will encounter weregild as a functioning legal institution; researchers working with 18th- or 19th-century common law sources will find it treated as a historical artifact.
The informant-reward problem. In 19th-century American criminal practice, the paid-informant sense of blood money generated recurring credibility and ethics debates. Courts and commentators questioned whether testimony purchased by the prospect of a reward was reliable, and whether the reward itself corrupted the administration of capital justice. Researchers examining capital case transcripts, grand jury materials, or legal reform literature from this period may find "blood money" used as a rhetorical charge against the prosecution's witnesses, not as a neutral descriptor.
No modern statutory term. Neither sense of blood money survives as a defined term in modern American statutory or case law. The weregild concept has no analog in current American civil law (wrongful death claims are governed by statute and run to the estate or statutory beneficiaries, not through private compensation agreements). The informant-reward concept is now addressed through witness credibility rules and disclosure requirements rather than through a named doctrine. Researchers looking for modern law on either underlying concept must use different vocabulary entirely.
Corpus connections. Because the term appears in both criminal law and property/financial law contexts (particularly in discussions of money with tainted origins), researchers may encounter "blood money" in sources adjacent to money laundering analysis, though the term is not a term of art in that field.
Historical Dictionary Support
Both editions of Black's Law Dictionary provide nearly identical entries, which is itself informative: the definition did not develop or refine between editions, suggesting that by the time of Black's writing, blood money was already being treated as a historical curiosity rather than a living legal term. Both editions anchor the primary definition in weregild and note the secondary informant-reward meaning as a "popular sense" — a signal that Black's did not regard the second meaning as fully technical.
What Black's omits is significant. Neither edition addresses the procedural or evidentiary implications of paid informant testimony, the displacement of weregild by royal criminal jurisdiction, or any jurisdictional variation. The entries read as encyclopedic glosses rather than practitioner-oriented definitions, which reflects the term's status as historically grounded but practically dormant by the late 19th century.
Webster's 1913 is actually more expansive than Black's on the moral and functional range of the term, covering betrayal payments and the proceeds of contract killing — meanings that Black's does not treat as legal at all. This divergence between the legal dictionary and the general dictionary is useful evidence of how the term was understood by the educated public versus by legal professionals at the same moment in time.
Jurisdictional Note
Weregild-style compensation payments have no standing in any American common law jurisdiction. Modified forms of blood money compensation persist in certain Islamic legal systems (diya) and in some customary law traditions recognized by tribal or indigenous legal frameworks. Researchers working in comparative law or international contexts should not assume that the term is as legally inert elsewhere as it is in American domestic law.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
The Law Mind Criminal Law Encyclopedia: criminal_93 (Money Laundering, 18 USC 1956–1957) — relevant if researching whether proceeds characterized as blood money trigger anti-money laundering analysis.
The Law Mind Business Organizations & Corporate Law Encyclopedia: business_123 (Banking — Bank Secrecy Act and Anti-Money Laundering) — relevant for financial institution reporting obligations when funds may have been obtained through violent crime.