Luigi Mangione pleads not guilty to murdering healthcare CEO
Luigi Mangione pleads not guilty to murdering healthcare CEO
The 26-year-old suspect is facing separate federal charges that could lead to a death sentence.
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Holy shit. Do his lawyers believe he can beat these charges?? What's going on
The evidence against him appears to be that the guy who murdered the CEO might have similar eyebrows to Luigi Mangione, but it's hard to tell from the security video. There's nothing else that puts him at the scene. They can say it's him all they want, but they'll have to reveal some better evidence if they want us to believe it.
Didn't he have the burner gun still on him? Honestly asking, I know a lot of disinformation tends to go out early, and I haven't followed up on verified facts.
Thats what they said, which is extraordinarily suspicious. The weapon is to be disposed of, literally everyone knows this. And to carry it to another state for days?
They said he had a gun, but a) I'm not convinced of the accuracy of techniques like striation matching which are used to determine whether a bullet was fired by a specific gun, and b) it could have been planted by the police, even if it was the murder weapon (they might have found it in NYC, lied about not finding it, and then planted it on their preferred suspect to construct an evidentiary link where none existed).
The whole gun planting take seems like conspiratory nonsense to me. And I'll trust the forensic science on the striations.
the famously rigorous and well tested field of forensic "science".
Rofl. OK. So forensics is fake science now, too? Because it could implicate someone you'd rather see go free?
How is this kind of mental gymnastics any different than the covid deniers.
a lot of forensics is legitimately junk science that’s been disproven by much better science
It's famously subjective. My highschool taught it and showed how you could push any narrative as long as the evidence was gray. It's almost always gray in these situations.
tacking the word "science" on to something doesn't make it scientific. much of it is based off of wild assumptions and "common sense" that was never actually studied or confirmed through testing. its about as scientific as alchemy.
I don't have a source, but I've been hearing for a while now that there is a lot of pseudo science in matching barrels to bullets.
Polygraphs ended up being pretty much complete bullshit and roadside drug tests are real bad about false positives.
IDK, it's basically a tool mark. I've looked at those under microscopes. They vary a whole lot when things are running well. I would think you could only really match something if there was a distinctive abnormal feature.
It does seem weird to me that he would still have all the evidence on him in Middle-of-Nowhere PA, a couple days later, but I mostly just talk about that as a way to point out this is all still allegations
Eh. He could have intended to use it again, or didn't find an opportune time to ditch/destroy it. Or maybe he's not the master People's assassin that everyone wants him to be.
If you're going to court for any criminal charge, you plead not guilty. The DA is going to have laid the strongest charges they believe they can get a conviction on, but there is always risk in going to trial. The prosecution generally cares a lot more about getting a conviction than what charge that conviction is on, or what penalty that conviction carries.
So. You're caught dead to rights, charged with a crime. If you plead guilty, you are also waiving your right to trial, and taking whatever conviction and (probably) penalty the prosecution advises the judge.
On the other hand, if you plead not guilty, now you have the opportunity to accept a plea deal from the prosecution - changing your plea to guilty - which would include what charge and what penalty. Depending on what you've done, this can save you a lot of money, reduce or eliminate probation or incarceration time, or take the death penalty off the table.
You can always change your plea from not guilty to guilty. You can't do that the other way around. Whenever you see headlines about "So-and-so pleads not guilty," that doesn't (in most cases) mean they intend to beat the charge. It's just what you do.
Another huge, important, but subtle distinction to make here is that the trial is not to decide whether you did the thing. It's not always a mystery who perpetrated an alleged crime. Even if you pull out a gun and shoot somebody on the 50-yard-line at the Super Bowl, and 300 million people see it, they can't just take you off to prison for murder. They have to give you a trial to determine whether you violated the law.
There's a thing called an affirmative defense, as in, "yes, I did the thing, but it wasn't a crime, because..." If you can, say, convince a jury that you're a time traveler, the ref was going to make a bad call in the 4th quarter that cost your team the Super Bowl win, and that justified shooting him, well, then it wasn't a crime. That's what a jury is ultimately charged with deciding.
This is not to say that Magione's attorney plans to present an affirmative defense, just that there are a number of good reasons to plead not guilty, even if it's 100% certain you did the thing.
(Edit: Typo.)
Thank you for your comment
Guilty or not, always plead not guilty at the start. You'll often have a chance to accept a better plea deal before trial if you want. Or you can go to trial.
Unless you are looking forward to serving time (free food, warm bed, access to healthcare).
free food, warm bed, access to healthcare. I'd kill for that right now.
You can kill for that
A Healthcare CEO if you wouldn't mind
Plead not guilty, then wait for jury nullification. This is the way.
NYC residents:
If you are picked for a jury, I know it can be annoying and take time out of your busy life. But honestly, it is the last purely democratic area of our life. The jury has the power to ensure the laws are fairly and equally applied.
Remember that your job as jury is to not only find the facts of the case but also to make sure that the charges fit the crime.
There is one more job you have: is the law correct in this specific crime?
Judges won't tell you this. Prosecutors will make you leave this choice outside the courthouse. But you have it.
The responsibility of the jury is protected so that you cannot be held accountable or even questioned (in an official setting anyway) as to why you voted the way you did. You have the power to view the facts, know that the defendant is guilty, but vote to acquit because you believe the law is wrong in his case.
Don't let prosecutors or the judge trick you.
All in Minecraft, of course.
Yeah, the absurd terrorism charges are probably possible to beat, so no reason to plead guilty to them. They are probably not questioning the murder charges, but that's beside the point.
I'm sure they're contesting all of it. There isn't a downside and a conviction depends on the state having all it's ducks in a row, which they do fuck up sometimes.
There is also even a real possibility that he's innocent and they're trying to pin it on him.
What's the downside exactly? Pleading guilty doesn't really come with any upside especially if they're putting the death penalty on the table.