Luigi Mangione walked into a Manhattan federal courtroom earlier today to plead guilty to interstate stalking charges. In the process, he admitted that he killed UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, stating “on the morning of Dec. 4, 2024, I shot Mr. Thompson in Manhattan, and he died.” The stalking statute does not require a dead body… he just volunteered this fact in court. As soon as he did, his lawyers reportedly ran over to the state courthouse and filed a motion to get out of the New York state murder trial claiming that those charges now amount to double jeopardy.
The gambit stinks of a Justice Department more interested in scoring political points than honoring the rule of law. From the beginning, federal law enforcement tried to snake the case away from the Manhattan DA’s office — likely owing to the president’s lingering resentment that the DA successfully got Donald Trump convicted of multiple felonies because Donald Trump committed multiple felonies. In its quest to steal the DA’s thunder, federal prosecutors tried to use federal murder law to saddle Mangione with the death penalty.
After a federal judge tossed the capital counts, the Department of Justice lost its death penalty leverage and found itself left with substantially lesser stalking charges. Rather than give up at this point, the federal government apparently convinced Mangione’s team to plead to federal stalking — and admit that it resulted in death — to secure a sentencing enhancement to a life term. Whether the judge honors that enhancement at sentencing will be determined down the road.
Stalking is not murder. But Mangione will argue — and the Trump administration will hope — that this plea will put a legal bar on the New York prosecution, preventing the state from putting a man on trial for a murder committed in New York.
From the Mangione camp, this isn’t a surprise. They have attempted to cast this case as a double jeopardy matter from the start. “One plus one is two,” as Mangione himself put it. His attorney Karen Friedman Agnifilo has also framed the case as “two bites of the apple.” For the Department of Justice to give aid to this strategy — using lesser charges to affirmatively cut off a murder case to spite local prosecutors — achieves a new, if unsurprising low for the “president of law and order”:
This argument should be a nonstarter. Dual sovereignty exists, and the DOJ explicitly lost its bid to charge Mangione under federal murder laws. The state should be more than free to prosecute the act of murder in its own borders where there is legally no federal case.
But New York does not run on the common standard of double jeopardy. Criminal Procedure Law § 40.20 provides far broader protections for previously convicted defendants. Under New York’s statute, double jeopardy attaches if the two charges — including if one of the cases was brought by the feds — took place as part of the same “criminal transaction.”
The defense will argue that because Mangione followed Thompson around before killing him, this amounts to the same criminal transaction. The state will, instead, point to the several exceptions provided by Section 40.20. For instance:
(a) The offenses as defined have substantially different elements and the acts establishing one offense are in the main clearly distinguishable from those establishing the other;
Stalking and murder seem pretty different! The defense will argue that because the sentencing enhancement involves admitting to the killing, that enhancement’s elements make it not substantially different from the state’s second degree murder charge. That smacks of “lawyerball,” but may be sufficient to defeat the state. This exception though…
(b) Each of the offenses as defined contains an element which is not an element of the other, and the statutory provisions defining such
offenses are designed to prevent very different kinds of harm or evil;
Murder includes many elements that are not an element of the federal stalking offense. Stalking requires an intent to take actions that create or, if known, would create a reasonable fear of bodily harm or death. Actually doing that is not an element. It’s also not the same “kind of harm or evil.” The stalking charge exists to stop people making interstate threats, and murder charges exist to punish killers. A sentencing enhancement does not change the charge’s design.
That Mangione admitted to the killing as part of pleading to a non-homicide charge doesn’t magically transform it into homicide. Turning a volunteered fact into a get-out-of-murder-trial card is a heavy lift.
The DA’s office hasn’t laid out its arguments yet, but appears prepared to push back:
That said, if Mangione gets a life sentence for stalking, New York might decide it’s not worth the resources to add years to Luigi’s corpse. On the other hand, there’s the principle of the thing… and the very real risk of corruption.
Taking this to its logical conclusion, if a future defendant commits a crime in a Democratic jurisdiction, the feds can vaporize the pending state case by manufacturing a low-level federal plea while making the defendant gratuitously allocute to the elements of the bigger state crime. That seems like a valid concern when dealing with a Justice Department that’s already tried to substitute itself into Trump cases. This would become another arrow in the quiver to upset legitimate prosecutions to shield the administration’s cronies.
Better yet, federal pardons don’t cover state crimes. Envision the DOJ bringing some tenuously interstate crime, the defendant pleading guilty, using this as the basis of nuking the state case, and then pardoning the federal crime. Pardons under this administration have already raised “pay-to-play” concerns. If double jeopardy becomes an avenue to skirt dual sovereignty, it doesn’t take much imagination to see where the pardon market would go.
That’s what makes this such a dangerous test case. Mangione is the ideal test subject precisely because there’s no reason to push the state case if he’s already going away for life. But that’s the thing about crossing the line… once it succeeds, the DOJ is free to try it elsewhere.
Earlier: Federal Judge Drops Death Penalty In Luigi Mangione Trial
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