Luigi Mangione won’t face the death penalty for allegedly executing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, a Manhattan federal judge ruled Friday — dealing a blow to the Justice Department.
The 27-year-old accused killer will still face the possibility of life in prison without parole if convicted of fatally shooting Thompson in a December 2024 targeted hit on a Midtown sidewalk.
But Judge Margaret Garnett threw out the charges against Mangione that could have led to a rare death penalty trial in New York.
The judge issued her ruling in writing mere minutes before Mangione, shackled by his feet and wearing tan jail scrubs, appeared before her at a pre-trial hearing in Manhattan federal court Friday morning.
When Garnett read the gist of her ruling out loud in the courtroom, Mangione didn’t appear to have much of a reaction — staring cooly straight ahead before briefly stroking his chin with his left hand.
The jurist found that the death penalty-eligible parts of the case, brought by the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, had “legal infirmities,” according to her ruling.
To bring a capital punishment case, prosecutors needed to show that Mangione had killed Thomspon while committing another “crime of violence.”
Mangione is charged not only with killing the healthcare insurance executive, but also “stalking” him — yet stalking doesn’t meet the legal definition of a crime of violence, the judge found.
Garnett, a former high-ranking Manhattan federal prosecutor, noted that her ruling “may strike the average person — and indeed many lawyers and judges — as tortured and strange” given the shocking violence that Mangione is accused of carrying out. --->READ MORE HERE
"This opinion may strike the average person — and indeed many lawyers and judges — as tortured and strange"
First, Judge Gregory Carro in New York State argued that Luigi Mangione, the leftist terrorist, wasn’t a terrorist because he said he wasn’t.
Judge Gregory Carro argued that Luigi Mangione was wrongly being charged as a terrorist since the radical terrorist’s objective “was not to threaten, intimidate or coerce, but rather to draw attention to what he perceived as the greed of the insurance industry.”
Rather than following the law, Carro chose to read the most sympathetic interpretation into Luigi’s writings. “The defendant’s apparent objective, as stated in his writings, was not to threaten, intimidate, or coerce, but rather, to draw attention to what he perceived as the greed ofthe insurance industry,” the judge wheedled. “The defendant emphasized that he wished to spread a ‘message’ and ‘win public support’ about ‘every.thing wrong with our health system.’”
Judge Carro argues that “the defendant explicitly contrasted himself with Ted Kaczynski, the ‘Unabomber,’ because he ‘indiscriminately mail bomb[ed] innocents,’ and ‘cross[ed] the line … to terrorist, the worst thing a person can be.’”
More of the same now at the federal level where Judge Margaret Garnett, a recent Biden appointee, decided that Luigi Mangione stalking Brian Thompson in order to kill him wasn’t a “crime of violence”.
Judge Garnett, a Biden appointee, noted the “apparent absurdity”, arguing that “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.” --->READ MORE HERE
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