Sure, we all “know” that Luigi Mangione shot the CEO of the insurance company.
But first, of course, he deserves a fair trial.
And a court case starts with discovery.
But, wow..there’s a LOT of discovery!
How complex can this guy’s actions be?
This link
says that there are "more than 15,000 pages of documents and thousands of hours of video related to his case that prosecutors turned over to his attorneys.
( Luigi has requested to be allowed a laptop in his cell, so he can read and watch all the evidence.)
I can guess where are they finding thousands of hours of video. I suppose there are a lot of surveillance cameras. Starting with the hotel he stayed in for two days -48 hours Say, one camera at the front desk, one at the elevators, and one or two others–that’s 5x48 or about 250 hours. . And cameras at greyhound bus stations for the day or two before. Say 50 hours. If there were 10 cameras at the bus station, that’s 500 hours So my total is 750 hours of video. Not quite "thousands, but maybe I’m missing something. Also, even if there are lots of cameras at the bus stations, his route and schedule are known, so there should only be a couple hour window of time at each camera that needs checking. That reduces my 750 hours to a much lower number. But, I ain’t no detective, so maybe I’m not understanding something.
But my main question is: where are they finding fifteen thousand pages of documents? The guy was a lone wolf. He had a typical social media presence, and wrote a couple of manifestos. .
He had some heath records which are relevant.(if his constant pain motivated him to kill the insurance guy who denied him coverage.)
But 15,000 pages?
The Warren commission report on JFK’s asasination is only 888 pages long.
It’s not just the footage when he might have been there that’s relevant: It’s the footage from when any other potential killer might have been there. In principle, the defense could point to some other spot on the videos, and say “Look, see, this other person was also in the right places at the right times, so maybe it was them”.
Every interview and tip call gets a document. Many will be more than one page. I’ve seen well over 1000 pages for a police report of a car crash. 15,000 pages doesn’t surprise me. Most are useless, but the government has to turn over everything.
Defense says we want every document related to X, Y and Z. Prosecution dumps everything even tangentially related so they can’t get accused of leaving something out with the added bonus of the Defense having to go through an insane amount of data. This is an example of AI being a very useful tool.
And for every piece of footage, there will be a minimum 20 accompanying documents attesting to the footage’s source, ownership, approval for transfer, yada yada yada. The defense gets all this, because if the source and approval isn’t properly documented, there could be grounds for exclusion.
When I was much younger, I had a job at a law firm organizing the documents associated with a long-running case. There were dozens and dozens of boxes, literally filling a room. I needed to eliminate duplicates to slim down the size of the collection — there was lots of redundancy — but I had to scrutinize each one carefully because many were almost-but-not-quite duplicates, iterations and drafts that varied in small details over time, or the same provenance form that had been filed for many different pieces of evidence and which varied only in the single document ID number, and on and on and on. I have no idea how many individual documents there were but it took me weeks.
So it doesn’t surprise me that this high profile case would generate that volume of material.
The defense might have also served subpoenas on UnitedHealthcare regarding any correspondence or issues that Luigi had, or evidence of perfidy (of which there is apparently plenty including ongoing litigation involving Thompson). None of that is going to prevent him from being tried and almost certainly convicted as he was caught with the weapon and before and after pictures clearly identifying him in addition to a written manifesto, but he gets to make his case including appealing to the jury for some kind of leniency or ignoring the law (nullification).
That published report was accompanied by 26 volumes of supporting documents totalling over 16,000 pages.
But in terms of total documents:
The President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection consists of over six million pages of records, photographs, motion pictures, sound recordings, and artifacts.
He doesn’t get to appeal to the jury for nullification, does he? If he (or more likely council) even hunted at something like that, there would be a mistrial.
He can hope for nullification, but he’s not allowed to express that hope to the jury on any way, shape, or form.
A true nullification (all twelve vote to acquit), which is never in a million years going to happen, would be the end of it. It probably have to happen at both the State and Federal level most likely.
One hold out juror is conceivable but that would be a mistrial and then almost certainly a new trial.
No competent counsel will use the words “jury nullification” because despite what sovereign citizens might tell you it is not a valid legal concept but any good defense attorney will argue in closing that their client should be exonerated for ‘reasons’ including temporary emotional distress, external influence, fugue state, et cetera. Of course, the judge will issue instructions to the jury before sending them to deliberations which will specify how they consider the testimony, what factors may or may not be weighed in consideration of guilt or innocent, whether pleas for diminished capacity or other mitigations should be considered, et cetera, and where counsels’ closing statements contradict these instructions the judge will specifically note that they should ignore those statements and follow the instructions.*
Mangioni repeatedly shot an unarmed, unaware man in the back after making extensive planning to be in position and then to escape capture. I’ll defer to actual lawyers experienced in criminal proceedings but if you think twelve people on a jury who have managed to get through voir dire are all going to vote to acquit I think you’ve seen one too many John Grisham adaptations. Even if defense counsel somehow convinces a jury to acquit, a judge is almost certain to declare a mistrial on the basis of the jury not following instructions because unless the defense can introduce some significant element of doubt into the evidence that Mangioni was the person on video who committed the murder and later found with the murder weapon (a ‘ghost gun’ that he procured the action and printed the frame), there is no legitimate way the jury can find that he did not commit the crime he is accused of with obvious premeditation, written intent, and deliberate action to avoid capture and consequences.
*I once sat on a jury (as an alternate) where the accused was caught on camera engaging in the crime (public masturbation), was identified by the arresting officer as the person on camera, did not testify in his own defense nor presented any witnesses or testimony. The defense strategy basically consisted of repeatedly objecting to everything to a point that the judge literally threatened to hold defense counsel in contempt (which despite what you see on the televisor is extremely unusual in criminal cases), and then presenting as his closing argument some sliding scale of justice on a temperature chart which told members of the jury that we could not possibly convict unless the prosecution met the highest possible standard of showing that the defendant knowingly and intentionally committed the crime with great deliberation. The judge let him go on for about twenty minutes of this nonsense, and then finally shut him down and said, “The jury will disregard defense’s interpretation and will follow my instructions.” (The prosecutor’s closing statement was just to repeat that the incident was caught on camera, the perpetrator was identified by the officer in the room, and then force us to watch that fucking video twice more, the second time in slow motion just to hammer the point home.)
Was convicted after about 15 minutes of deliberations; I assume most of that time was administrative stuff like voting a foreman and reading instructions but I was an alternate so I wasn’t in the jury room. The defense counsel had the fucking gall to accost me as I was leaving the courthouse, physically impeding me from proceeding to the parking lot and demanding an explanation for my vote, so apparently he wasn’t paying much attention to who were voting members and who were alternates. I went back into the courthouse and complained to deputies about being accosted and restrained, and they just laughed and said, “We can’t do nothin’, First Amendment and all that, but if you put a finger in him he’ll sue you for everything you own.” I went back out to confront the fucker and get video of his act but apparently he found someone else to hassle or just packed up and left. Worst jury experience I’ve had and that included the one where a prospective juror faked being ill and made herself throw up to get out of serving.
Would that be legal? A judge can overturn a jury’s finding of Not Guilty? And on the basis that the defense didn’t meet some standard of evidence? That sounds completely contrary to the American court system.
