How to get cron to pkill my java process?

I have a cron job that runs to detect if a certain application has frozen. If so it should kill the frozen application and restart it. The application is a Java program. When the application is frozen, my cron job tries to kill it using pkill -9 java, but it says permission not given due to cron not being able to kill java. But I can run this command fine as the user. What am I doing wrong? *update below is the cron line i use: */20 * * * * /bin/bash /home/userabc/node_checker.sh >> /home/userabc/node_checker.log That runs this file: The cron runs that .sh file but in my logs I'm getting permission denied. I'm assuming its because of the user cron?