The federal death penalty has been taken off the table for Luigi Mangione, the man accused of gunning down UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in Manhattan in late 2024, after a judge threw out two of the four federal counts against him.
According to The Post Millennial, US District Judge Margaret M. Garnett dismissed the charge of murder through use of a firearm the only count that could have resulted in a death sentence along with a related firearms offense. Two federal stalking counts remain, leaving Mangione still facing the possibility of life in prison without the possibility of parole.
The murder count required prosecutors to prove that Thompsons killing occurred during another crime of violence, which the government argued was Mangiones alleged stalking of the healthcare executive. Prosecutors claimed Mangione tracked Thompson online and then crossed state lines to carry out the fatal shooting, but Garnett ruled that the stalking charges do not qualify as crimes of violence under current Supreme Court precedent and therefore dismissed the murder and associated gun charges.
In a candid acknowledgment of how counterintuitive that outcome may appear, Garnett wrote, "The analysis contained in the balance of this opinion may strike the average person and indeed many lawyers and judges as tortured and strange, and the result may seem contrary to our intuitions about the criminal law. But it represents the Courts committed effort to faithfully apply the dictates of the Supreme Court to the charges in this case. The law must be the Courts only concern."
The judge also handed prosecutors a significant victory by allowing key physical evidence to be used at trial, despite defense claims of an unconstitutional search. Garnett ruled that federal jurors may hear about items seized from the backpack Mangione carried when he was arrested in Pennsylvania days after the shooting, including fake identification documents, a ghost gun, and writings attacking the US healthcare system.
Defense attorneys had urged the court to suppress the contents of the backpack, arguing that officers violated Mangiones Fourth Amendment rights when they searched it. Rejecting that argument, Garnett stated, "The search was reasonable under the facts of this case."
While the Biden-era Justice Department loses its capital charge in a case involving the high-profile killing of a major health insurance executive, Mangione still faces a daunting legal battle at both the federal and state levels. In addition to the remaining federal stalking counts, for which trial is scheduled to begin on September 8, he has been indicted on nine charges by New York state prosecutors over the December 2024 slaying of Thompson outside a Manhattan hotel, ensuring that the question is no longer whether he will face justice, but how severe that justice will ultimately be.
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