‘Only one viable defense’: how might the CEO murder case play out in court? | Brian Thompson shooting

When Luigi Mangione was arrested at an Altoona, Pennsylvania, McDonald’s on 9 December following a tip from a restaurant employee, New York City authorities celebrated his capture.

The suspected shooter of Brian Thompson, the United Healthcare CEO, was finally in custody five days after allegedly gunning down the executive outside a Midtown Manhattan hotel and then fleeing the city by bus.

Mangione, 26, purportedly left a trail of evidence in his wake: surveillance footage showing his face, as well as fingerprints on a cereal bar and water bottle near the murder scene, linked him to the shooting, authorities said.

Local police in Altoona allegedly discovered still more evidence linking Mangione to the crime: a black 3D-printed pistol and silencer, as well as a manifesto that railed against health insurers’ prioritization of profits over patients.

Mangione, who allegedly carried a fake ID, was arrested on weapons and forgery charges, and has since been jailed in Pennsylvania. He is fighting extradition to New York City for second-degree murder and gun charges.

Yet, despite this alleged abundance of evidence, veteran New York City attorneys believe that Mangione might have a viable trial defense that could keep him from spending the rest of his years behind bars – even if jurors eventually find that he killed Thompson.

Robert C Gottlieb, a longtime defense attorney, said that in general, attorneys need to establish several factual issues from the outset: did the person charged with murder commit the physical act of causing death? Do police have the right person? Were there other people involved?

If a defendant did commit the murder, an attorney can then assess “whether or not at the time of the commission of the physical acts, was he able to really understand the consequences of his conduct, appreciate that it was wrong?”, Gottlieb said.

“Those are the factors that go into the what’s typically called the ‘insanity defense’, but it’s more accurate to call that defense the ‘mental disease and defect defense’,” Gottlieb said. “If you are suffering from a substantial mental disease or defect, then it makes it unlikely that you could really appreciate the consequences of the acts, and that it was wrong based on your mental health at the time of the act.”

If jurors determine that a person did commit murder but did so due to these factors, a defendant would be sent to a secure mental health facility and stay there until found not to be a danger to themself or others, attorneys said.

One longtime New York City defense lawyer, who spoke under condition of anonymity to avoid any potential future conflict of interest, said that in any case, “there are a limited number of defenses”.

The alleged litany of evidence against Mangione limits the potential defenses still more.

“There’s always the defense ‘you’ve got the wrong guy’, but that doesn’t seem to be applicable here,” this attorney said. “There’s the defense [that] your client did it but it’s justified for some reason – self-defense, for example, [but] that doesn’t seem to be at play here.

“So what you’re left with is potentially a psych defense. Based solely on what’s out there, [it is] possible that extreme emotional disturbance was at play.

“Usually, these defenses are ‘something terrible happened, and somebody snaps’. That’s the verb that’s often deployed. Somebody just snapped, they lost control.”

This defense traces its roots to English common law, and was meant to account for crimes in the heat of passion, such as someone catching their spouse cheating. “You don’t get a pass, but it’s mitigated, and that defense has developed in American law – specifically in New York law – to operate as a possible defense to murder,” this lawyer said.

This development has also allowed for extreme emotional disturbance to be used even in cases with premeditated planning of the crime.

“Extreme emotional disturbance doesn’t require that the disturbance has happened instantaneously or even suddenly – that doesn’t mean there can’t be planning, that doesn’t mean there isn’t intelligence behind the act,” they said.

For this strategy to work, this attorney said, the extreme emotional disturbance would need to be proven “reasonable from the point of view of the defendant at the time that it occurred”.

“He has one and only one viable defense and that is extreme emotional disturbance,” said Ron Kuby, a veteran criminal defense attorney whose practice focuses on civil rights.

“One version of extreme emotional disturbance is he just snapped, but the defense is broader than that and certainly covers the slow, bitter, corrosive wearing away of normal sentiments of right and wrong until it all collapses in pain,” Kuby explained.

If a jury finds a defendant guilty of murder, but also finds the crime was due to extreme emotional disturbance, that reduces the crime of murder to first-degree manslaughter. The sentencing range for first-degree manslaughter ranges from five to 25 years’ imprisonment.

“But, it does avoid a sentence that ends in the word ‘life’,” Kuby said.

“The good thing about the defense, from what I’m going to assume is Mr Mangione’s perspective, is that it’s a strong legal defense or at least it’s a viable legal defense, but it’s also a very strong public, political defense,” Kuby said.

He added: “All of his difficulties with the health insurance industry, all of his problems with them, everything that he knows and has read and has heard, the whole narrative comes in at the trial to show his state of mind.

“With the right lawyer, assuming this is what he wants, and he has a lawyer willing to do it, he can use his trial to further the national discussion that he began,” Kuby said. “You don’t have to sacrifice sound legal strategy for your political or social manifesto.”

In a case like this, Kuby said, a defendant should take the stand so that his grievances are heard.

In rare circumstances, a defendant can be found not mentally competent to stand trial, but attorneys said that the bar for mental competence was low in New York state.

“When found incompetent to stand trial in a murder case, they are held in a mental health facility until deemed competent to be tried,” Kuby explained.

The New York City defense attorney Julie Rendelman voiced similar sentiments about the potential mental health aspects of Mangione’s case.

“Based on what I’ve heard so far, it sounds like this was someone who was at least mentally healthy for some period of time … and then something broke,” she said.

Any attorney worth their salt would have Mangione’s mental state assessed. While it’s impossible to know from the outside, she said, “he may not be fit to even stand trial right now”.

“That’s the first question that will probably come up, because he has to be able to fully assist in his defense and understand the questioning,” Rendelman said.

Mangione’s Pennsylvania attorney did not respond to a request for comment, and it does not appear that he has a lawyer in New York.

“People have got to remember that he, and every defendant at this stage, is presumed innocent and all the speculation and wild talk on social media is worthless,” Gottlieb said. “People should just back off and let the process unfold in a thoughtful, lawful way.”