In December, Luigi Mangione was arrested for shooting health insurance executive Brian Thompson. Last week, Trump’s attorney general, Pam Bondi, announced that she was seeking the death penalty. It’s a highly unusual announcement, since Mangione hasn’t even been indicted yet on a federal level. (He has been indicted in Manhattan.) By intervening in this high-profile case, the Trump administration has made clear that it believes that CEOs are especially important people whose deaths need to be swiftly and mercilessly avenged.
I think the death penalty being on the table would increase the likelihood of the jury finding a reasonable doubt or jury nullification. It would only hurt the prosecution imo.
OR it’s going to prejudice the jury against him, like it usually does.
When capital punishment is on the table, only people who are in favor of it are selected for the jury, and people who are in favor of state murder are MUCH more likely to return a guilty verdict than people who aren’t.
That’s one of hundreds of reasons why civilized legal systems don’t murder prisoners anymore.
Why the fuck does the prosecution have the ability to put punishments on the table that are known to bias jury selection?
Because the system itself is rigged in favor of the prosecution by design.
Why is the jury selection not random
Yup. One of the main reasons people oppose the death penalty is because of the proven record of innocent people receiving death sentences. Approximately 4% of people who receive death sentences are actually innocent. We execute many innocent people in this country. The system absolutely does not operate on the principle of “it is better for 1000 guilty to go free than for one innocent to be unjustly punished.”
Many oppose the death penalty because they realize just how poor our justice system is at actually determining guilt and innocence. Those who assume it is near-infallible will be much more likely to support the death penalty. So if you screen out those opposed to death sentences, you also screen out people who are more skeptical of the criminal justice system overall.
Doesn’t the defense have just as much say in terms of who gets selected out and which signals are used to parse that
Not really, no.
AFAIK, the defense and the prosecution get the same number of “just because it’s bad for my side” exclusions, but not being inclined to render a guilty verdict if there’s a possibility of the death penalty is an automatic exclusion that doesn’t count towards the prosecution’s “freebies”.
So yeah, the moment death penalty is on the table, the jury will be biased AND the defense will be much more likely to consider a plea deal for a lesser punishment, further stacking the deck in favor of the prosecution winning one way or the other regardless of actual guilt.
Oh, shit! I’d really appreciate a source for that, if you have it handy
Didn’t have it handy, but didn’t take long to find this from Penn State, this from Cornell, and this from the US Office of Justice Programs that the DOGE kakistocracy has apparently not found yet…
Thank you!
You’re very welcome 🙂
I kind of agree, if I were in the jury, it would make me think twice about finding them guilty since I would feel like I have someone’s death on my hands.
Yeah but you’d be automatically excluded from jury duty if you admitted that. It’s like nullification.
Why does it feel like the trump administration would use Mangione’s acquittal by jury as a reason to try to attack and do away with the 6th Amendment (trial by jury amendment)?
Luckily it would be really hard for them to actually get rid of it. I wouldn’t put it past them to try to start doing summary executions or just illegally trying to detain people without trial or whatever but there’s 0 chance they get the support to actually remove that amendment.
They’re just going to skip the courts altogether like they’ve been doing.
The tact taken by this administration isn’t trying to amend the Constitution, its to simply ignore it. There are three branches of government in the USA. trump’s Executive branch and the Legislative appear to be in nearly lock-step in ignoring the Constitution and their duties to uphold it. The Supreme Court has capitulated in almost every action trump’s Executive has asked, with only minor pushback. The recent 9-0 Supreme Court decision requiring the trump administration to return of Ábrego García to the USA is the first real pushback we’ve seen. So far trump is continuing to ignore the return requirement.
In other words, the Constitution is worthless if the bodies in power charged with its defense choose to simply break their oath of office and not defend it.
they blocked the corpse pile at cecot on apple maps but what about the other satellite photo providers?
Yep, if you set the bar extraordinarily high, then you have to jump extraordinarily high. Bondi’s likely doing more harm than good for her cause.
Assuming his trial is carried out normally and isn’t a sham
This ☝️
There’s no way this jury is going to be allowed to find him innocent much less jury nullification. If they can’t be bribed they’ll be threatened.
My worry is that trump is thinking of sending him to CECOT.
Trump always starts with the “worst” criminals as he knows it’s hard for Democrats or others to object since they don’t want to be “on the side of criminals,” but it won’t end there.
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I didn’t realize muscle was so flabby
The bullets Mangione used to kill Thomson had “deny,” “delay,” and “depose” inscribed on them.
Allegedly. The reporter forgot to be professional for a moment.
“Forgot”
The reporters can always seem to sane-wash Trump and his ilk, and always give them the benefit of the doubt, but not Mangione. Musk gave a salute that was “awkward” and “looked similar to” a Nazi salute, but Mangione is just presumed guilty. Trump is a “successful businessman” despite bankrupting numerous companies, but Mangione is assumed to be a guilty evil murderer before he’s even indicted!
I’m glad they’re seeking the death penalty.
Because it makes it much easier for the defence team to argue that the prosecution is trying to turn the law into a spectacle, and that Luigi should be acquitted of all charges.
The federal system gives the judge a lot more power, they can basically pick the jury and evidence themselves, and appeals really, really suck.
It doesn’t much matter if it’s easier for the defense to argue that. It matters what the judge and jury find.
None of this, of course, is to say that what Mangione did was justifiable or wise.
Um, fuck you? He hasn’t been convicted and the author’s assumption here, that Mangione is guilty of what he has been accused of, is part of the fucking problem.
Damn, when did Jacobin get soft?
He should run for office
Well, we have a convicted felon and rapist as president already.
Exactly. They’ve set a precedent that running for office gets you out of any consequences. I really want to see what happens if Mangione runs for congress
Eat your local CEO
Californians would die of heart attack after eating all of them
At least then they could afford to have a heart attack. Heck, have two
It’s BOGO!
after they first died of state mandated cancer
He’s a real true America hero and a patriot! Que Viva Luigi!
This guy killed a patrician and now that class has totally seized controlled of government.
Supposedly
So what are the odds of jury nullification on this case?
ok but killing a millionaire is defensible
Not because they’re a millionaire. Because they’re a CEO whose policies directly resulted in unnecessary suffering and death.
Billionaires do deserve to die for being billionaires though.
You can’t amass that type of wealth without being responsible for human suffering en masse. It’s impossible.
yeah I think this distinction is important. we don’t need to kill the working professionals who saved money and invested wisely throughout their careers. many of those people will eventually be millionaires, but like, ones of millions.
once you get to hundreds of millions it starts to look like there was no possible moral way to arrive at that.
We should also make a distinction for the arts and artisans. In theory, an artist can sell their work for a billion dollars, making them a billionaire. I’m fine with that, because nobody gets exploited in the process. Like if an actor or rock star charges a billion dollars for a performance, or a painter charges a billion dollars for a painting, or a carpenter charges a billion to install hardwood floors. If people are willing to pay it, then I don’t really see a problem.
That said, their wealth should still be taxed like a motherfucker.
I think there’s still a pretty solid argument that its shitty to remain a billionare. If I won that kind of money on the lottery I’d set asside enough to retire very comfortably (and still feel a little bad about it) and then build affordable housing and shit.
Hoarding that much money is, in my opinion, just as bad as hoarding a cure for cancer. There are like half a dozen people with enough wealth to eliminate hunger and homelessness worldwide, but every one of them refuses to lift a finger beyond performative bullshit for PR. The level of inhumanity it takes to be like that is off the charts. It’s sociopathic.
This. 👆
Agreed, its a bit like self defense or defending others.
If you are armed and see a murder about to happen you CAN legally intervene with a firearm. You do not have to standby and let someone get killed.
UHC was killing thousands and apparently the government was/is fine with it. Thus … it was a defensive killing.
This discussion would get me banned off of Reddit (again).
My favorite Reddit alt got disappeared because the degree of subtlety with which I conducted my advocacy for political violence dipped once by accident below the acceptable threshold. So I’m here. Hah!
We live in a post-defensibility society.
He’d became a martyr. The best chance way the ruling class could handle this is letting him go on the condition that he denies every publicity possible for a given years, even “just” imprisonment would communicate “we fear guys like this”.
It’s very naive of people to think that in an authoritarian dictatorship controlled by the world’s wealthiest people, that there won’t be a LOT of unjust deaths in the coming years.
I will be positively shocked if they don’t make a very public example of Mangione. It’s going to hurt and that’s what they want. They want to kill him in front of us so we feel pain. Then they’re going to do it again and again with other people whom we don’t want to see die. Remember that. This is what happens.
This is what 45% of eligible voters thought would never happen so they stayed home. Too much trouble. Too hard to figure out the truth (by googling for 30 seconds). Too many excuses to not rock the boat, and now the boat is rocking us all out.
I mean, it’s somewhat defensible, right? He did kill someone, so isn’t it symmetric if he gets killed? You can obviously make an argument against this but isn’t the tone of the article written to make it seem like this is just laughable, when it’s really not?
I’m sick of these hyperbolic headlines just to capture clicks.
The state killing its own citizens is never morally defensible.
It’s even more egregious when political influence tries to exert pressure on the legal process in an effort to prejudice that verdict.
