The Jury May Allow Mangione to Get Away with Murder
It’s a bedrock fact of the American justice system that everyone is innocent until proven guilty. That being said, unless we’re being lied to on a massive scale by a media that has no reason to lie in this case, Luigi Mangione doesn’t seem especially innocent.
He supposedly wrote a manifesto that seemed to point to a motive in killing United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson in New York City on Dec. 4.
He left digital fingerprints which would also point to a motive.
He, according to reports, also left real fingerprints near the scene of the crime, along with shell casings.
The murder was caught on camera, for Pete’s sake.
And yet, several experts have noted that he might be found not guilty by a jury — not because the state didn’t prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that he killed Thompson, but that a cult of hero worship has sprung up around him, so much so that several legal experts have floated the idea of jury nullification happening in his trial.
For instance, take CNN legal commentator Elie Honig; while Honig said he “wouldn’t necessarily lose sleep” over the online fame Mangione has garnered, it made him “nervous” about the possibility of jury nullification.
For the unfamiliar, this is the process whereby a member or members of a jury — in some cases, entire juries — disregard the facts of the case to either deliberately reach a verdict that doesn’t align with the facts presented in the courtroom or create a deadlock that ends in a mistrial.
“For sure, this is the highest risk of nullification that I have seen in a long time, given the fame and fandom that this guy has somehow gained over social media,” Honig said on Tuesday, according to Newsweek.
Free my man Luigi is too fine to be locked away for life let him go he didn’t do nothing 🥴 #UnitedHealthcareAssassin 😭 pic.twitter.com/qkl7XohKvT
— 𐚁 (@bemadgirl) December 9, 2024
“Free Luigi Mangione” seen in Camberwell, London, UK!! International support of Luigi is going strong 💪 pic.twitter.com/BMHgFYQybS
— CEO Slayer (@CEO_Slayers) December 26, 2024
“But it’s important to keep in mind, there are checks in place, first of all, the jury selection process,” he added.
“People who are overtly biased in his favor, people who have posted on social media, that kind of thing, they will be weeded out,” Honig said. “They will never even make it onto a jury. The other thing is, the whole trial process has the effect of sort of forcing people to get serious.
“It’s really hard to sit through weeks worth of overwhelming evidence that this person shot his victim in the back and then just say, ah, heck with it, I kind of like this guy or I saw some social media meme. So it’s always in play, but I think it’s important to understand we do have processes that sort of filter that kind of thing out.”
Former prosecutor and current criminal defense attorney Joel Cohen, a professor at Fordham and Cardozo law schools, also expressed his concerns for jury nullification in a piece for The Hill published Friday.
Cohen worried that those with a secret affection for the alleged killer might, in fact, be able to work their way onto a jury despite being “overtly biased,” as Honig put it.
“There are far too many among us whose inner voice allows them to somehow convince themselves that UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson had it coming — that Thompson deserved to be murdered, either because he was himself directly guilty of some insurance coverage denial or was a tangible proxy for a heartless industry that leaves its insured out to dry,” Cohen wrote.
“And, if secretly rooting for Luigi Mangione, now charged with murder, is not enough, too many publicly protest the prosecution of Mangione or make deposits to his prison commissary account to help fund his defense. We shouldn’t then be surprised, then, if Mangione admirers somehow manage to steal their way onto a jury slated to try him for the murder. Do we find ourselves in a new moment of the stealth juror, and if we do, what then is the fallout?”
Cohen also felt there was “no time in recent history where the media has been as fixated on an arrest and prosecution, and the possibility of nullification lurking as a real potential threat for prosecutors in jury selection.”
“Despite the growing mountain of evidence against Mangione, the hold-out juror might calmly drink their burnt coffee in a dusty jury deliberation room and explain to the other ’11 Angry Men’ or women that “I simply don’t believe he shot Thompson and you can’t make me think he did, no matter how hard you try.’ That is, if the nullifier/s even feel the need to utter any defense for their recalcitrance,” he wrote.
Furthermore, there’s the undeniable fact that Mangione “is young, handsome, fit — not unimportant in this context, given the social media explosion on the topic of his physical appearance,” Cohen wrote.
“Make no mistake, jury nullification, like it or not, is as American as apple pie: Courts recognize that jurors surely have the power to nullify, even if not the right,” he wrote.
“Let’s hope that the flames now being fanned by social media, fury over health care and somewhat short-sighted prosecutors don’t ultimately leave us engrossed with the rehashing of nullified verdicts, rather than having the opportunity to reflect on the loss of Brian Thompson, a man who, by all accounts, was a good man and father from the Midwest who simply didn’t deserve to be murdered in cold blood.”
Hopefully, this is what sinks in to a jury: Social media hagiographies of an alleged psychopathic murderer are one thing, but sitting on a jury and doing it is quite another. This case should be about the facts, not about sickos who have turned their grievances against our broken health care system into an excuse for cheering on murderous rage. Let’s hope and pray that ends up being the case.
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