Luigi Mangione appears at State Supreme Court for a hearing on murder charges for killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in New York City in February. Thompson was shot and killed in midtown Manhattan in a targeted attack as he was about to attend the company’s annual investor conference. File pool photo by Curtis Means/UPI | License Photo
May 1 (UPI) — Attorneys for alleged UnitedHealthCare CEO killer Luigi Mangione argued in a court filing Thursday that the murder indictment returned against him by a grand jury should be dismissed based on the fact that he faces double jeopardy.
Mangione, 26, is charged with the murder of UnitedHealthCare CEO Brian Thompson, whom he allegedly stalked and fatally shot on Dec. 4, outside a New York City hotel prior to a UHC shareholders meeting. He has pleaded not guilty.
Defense attorney Karen Friedman Agnifilo said the indictment should be dismissed “because concurrent state and federal prosecutions violate the Double Jeopardy Clause, the 14th Amendment’s Due Process Clause and Mr. Mangione’s constitutional rights against self-incrimination, to meaningfully defend himself, to a fair and impartial jury and to the effective assistance of counsel,” she wrote, according to ABC News.
Agnifilo added that Mangione faces federal charges and separate state changes in Pennsylvania because of “prosecutorial one-upmanship” because the offenses are in a legal tug-of-war.
Prosecutors argue that the first-degree murder charge is warranted and offered as evidence the words “delay, deny, depose” that were inscribed on gun shell casings found at the crime scene.
Those words are often associated with rejected insurance claims. They also point to Mangione’s online writings that suggest a fixation on UnitedHealthCare and what Mangione saw as its greed and profit motive.
Johnathon Roberie
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