Luigi Mangione pleaded not responsible on Friday to federal expenses of gunning down medical insurance government Brian Thompson, a day after prosecutors formally acknowledged their intent to hunt the demise penalty.
Mangione, 26, wore a tan jail-issued T-shirt as he was led into the packed decrease Manhattan courtroom. He beforehand pleaded not responsible to a separate set of New York state expenses over the Dec. 4 killing of Thompson, the previous CEO of UnitedHealth Group’s insurance coverage unit UnitedHealthcare.
He entered the plea at an arraignment earlier than U.S. District Decide Margaret Garnett.
U.S. prosecutors formally instructed a courtroom on Thursday that they plan to hunt the demise penalty for Mangione.
In justifying their choice, prosecutors wrote of their submitting that Mangione “presents a future hazard as a result of he expressed an intent to focus on a whole trade, and rally political and social opposition to that trade, by participating in an act of deadly violence.”
U.S. Legal professional Common Pam Bondi earlier this month introduced that the Justice Division would search the demise penalty for Mangione. The courtroom submitting on Thursday by the Manhattan U.S. lawyer’s workplace formalizes prosecutors’ intent to impose the demise penalty.
Mangione’s attorneys have stated Bondi’s April 1 announcement was “unapologetically political” and breached authorities protocols for demise penalty choices.
If Mangione is convicted within the federal case, the jury would decide in a separate section of the trial whether or not to advocate the demise penalty. Any such advice should be unanimous, and the decide could be required to impose it.
UnitedHealth Group CEO Andrew Witty mourned the killing of government Brian Thompson and stated he understood public frustrations with the ‘flawed’ U.S. health-care system on Friday, in a New York Instances opinion piece. It was his first public remark since Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealth’s medical insurance unit, was shot lifeless final week.
Thompson was shot lifeless on Dec. 4 outdoors a resort in midtown Manhattan, the place the corporate was gathering for an investor convention. The brazen killing and ensuing five-day manhunt captivated Individuals.
Cops in Altoona, Pa., discovered Mangione with a 9-mm pistol and silencer, clothes that matched the attire worn by Thompson’s shooter in surveillance footage and a pocket book describing an intent to “wack” an insurance coverage firm CEO, in keeping with a courtroom submitting.
Some Individuals have cheered Mangione, who was not identified to be a UnitedHealth buyer or consumer, saying he drew consideration to steep U.S. health-care prices and the facility of well being insurers to refuse cost for some therapies.
Mangione is being held in federal lockup in Brooklyn.
A crowd of individuals, many supporters, flocked to a New York Metropolis courthouse, the place Luigi Mangione pleaded not responsible to expenses of first-degree homicide and terrorism within the demise of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.
The choice to hunt the demise penalty revives a observe seen within the first Donald Trump administration, when 13 executions have been carried out between July 2020 and January 2021.
Previous to that, there’d been 17-year pause in executions of federal inmates, with none carried out through the presidency of Barack Obama or through the second time period of George W. Bush.
Legal professional Common Merrick Garland in Joe Biden’s administration instituted a moratorium on federal executions in 2021 pending a overview of procedures, though two demise penalty circumstances with origins that predated the Biden presidency continued — one involving an antisemitic gunman who murdered 11 folks at a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018 and one other for the accused in a Buffalo grocery store mass capturing.
The Justice Division below Garland declined to pursue the demise penalty in different mass killings, together with the gunman motivated by a hatred of immigrants who killed 23 folks at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, in 2019. That gunman, Patrick Crusius, was sentenced this week to life in prison.
Source link