By Jack Queen and Jonathan Stempel
NEW YORK, Jan 30 (Reuters) – Luigi Mangione will not face the death penalty after a U.S. judge on Friday dismissed murder and weapons charges against the accused killer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, in a major blow to federal prosecutors.
U.S. District Judge Margaret Garnett in Manhattan said she felt constrained by Supreme Court precedents to dismiss the murder charge, calling it legally incompatible with the two federal stalking charges Mangione still faces.
Mangione still faces murder charges in a separate case brought by state prosecutors.
Federal murder statutes carry different legal requirements than comparable state laws, and Garnett said federal law required Mangione’s murder and weapons charges to be tied to another crime of violence.
Stalking, the judge said, did not meet this requirement because it was neither “inherently” violent nor always intentional. Garnett acknowledged that the average person might be bewildered by the dismissal.
Mangione, 27, still faces possible life in prison without the possibility of parole if convicted on the stalking charges.
Dominic Gentile, a federal prosecutor, told Garnett at a court hearing that the government has not decided whether to appeal.
Speaking to reporters after the hearing, a lawyer for Mangione, Karen Agnifilo, thanked Garnett for the “incredible” decision. Asked for Mangione’s reaction, she said, “we’re all relieved.”
Thompson, who led UnitedHealth Group’s health insurance business, was shot and killed on December 4, 2024 outside the Hilton hotel in midtown Manhattan.
Mangione pleaded not guilty to all charges stemming from Thompson’s death, and has been jailed since his arrest in Pennsylvania five days after the killing.
While public officials widely condemned Thompson’s killing, Mangione became a folk hero of sorts to many Americans who decry high costs for medical care and health insurer practices.
JUDGE NOTES ‘TORTURED AND STRANGE’ LEGAL ANALYSIS
Scott Sundby, a University of Miami law professor, said Garnett’s decision hinged on a Supreme Court precedent aimed at constraining federal prosecutors from using vague statutes to bring inappropriate violent crime charges.
“While the alleged manner in which Luigi did this would strike a layperson as indisputably violent, that isn’t the question,” Sundby said. “The concern of the court is prosecutors using a vaguely defined crime that gives them too much power,” Sundby said.
Garnett has scheduled jury selection to begin in September, with the trial getting underway on October 12.
In her 39-page decision, Garnett said federal prosecutors could pursue their murder and weapons charges only if the stalking charges qualified as crimes of violence.
She said the stalking charges did not qualify because people could break the law without intentionally using force.
Garnett acknowledged the “apparent absurdity” of the legal landscape, saying no one would seriously question that Mangione’s alleged conduct — crossing state lines to kill a specific healthcare executive, and carrying a handgun equipped with a silencer — was violent criminal conduct.
She said her analysis may strike ordinary people, and many lawyers and judges, as “tortured and strange,” and the outcome “contrary to our intuitions about the criminal law.”
But she said her decision reflects “the court’s committed effort to faithfully apply the dictates of the Supreme Court to the charges in this case. The law must be the court’s only concern.”
EVIDENCE SEIZED FROM BACKPACK IS ADMISSIBLE
In a separate decision, Garnett rejected Mangione’s bid to exclude evidence seized from his backpack when he was arrested.
Mangione argued that evidence found in the backpack, including a 9-millimeter pistol, silencer and journal entries, should be suppressed because police obtained it without a warrant.
The judge said it was standard practice for local police to search closed bags that might reasonably contain dangerous objects, and the police had probable cause to conduct a search. She also said the contents would have been discovered inevitably through a federal search warrant.
Mangione has also pleaded not guilty to separate murder, weapons and forgery charges in a New York state court in Manhattan.
No trial date in that case has been set. Prosecutors in that case suffered their own setback in September, when the judge dismissed two terrorism-related counts against Mangione.
(Reporting by Jack Queen and Ryan Patrick Jones; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Bill Berkrot)
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