The Valley Viewpoint
There is something deeply unsettling about the latest chapter in the Luigi Mangione case.
Not because we don’t know who killed UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.
Luigi Mangione has now admitted that he did.
In federal court, Mangione acknowledged shooting Thompson on a Manhattan sidewalk in December 2024. There is no longer much mystery about the identity of the shooter. No whodunit. No competing theory about who pulled the trigger.
And yet, incredibly, Luigi Mangione may never be convicted of murder.
Readers of The Valley Viewpoint may remember that I have written before about the doctrine of dual sovereignty—the principle that allows state and federal governments, as separate sovereigns, to prosecute the same person for conduct arising from the same act without necessarily violating the federal Constitution’s prohibition against double jeopardy.
At the time, it may have sounded like one of those interesting but somewhat academic constitutional-law discussions.
The Mangione case demonstrates that it is anything but academic.
Normally, most of us understand double jeopardy pretty simply: the government doesn’t get to prosecute you, lose, and simply keep trying until it gets the result it wants.
Dual sovereignty complicates that.
The federal government and a state are separate sovereigns, each deriving its authority from a different source. Under longstanding Supreme Court precedent, both may sometimes prosecute the same defendant for offenses arising from the same conduct.
As I discussed in that earlier Viewpoint, however, the fact that the Constitution permits successive federal and state prosecutions doesn’t necessarily mean every state must permit them.
And New York is particularly important here.
New York law provides protections against successive prosecutions that can be broader than those guaranteed by the federal Constitution.
That distinction—between what federal constitutional law allows and what New York law prohibits—may now determine whether Luigi Mangione is ever actually convicted of murder.
Mangione recently pleaded guilty in federal court to stalking offenses resulting in Brian Thompson’s death. Those are extraordinarily serious crimes, and Mangione still faces the possibility of spending the rest of his life in prison.
But Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg still has a state murder prosecution pending.
Mangione’s lawyers are now arguing that because the federal prosecution has been resolved, New York’s protections against successive prosecutions prevent the state from proceeding with its murder case.
In other words, the very doctrine I previously wrote about has moved from the law books directly into one of the most closely watched criminal cases in America.
And there is an additional irony.
The federal government went big.
Federal prosecutors initially pursued charges carrying the possibility of the death penalty. Those charges were ultimately dismissed, and Mangione pleaded guilty to the remaining federal stalking offenses.
Now the state murder prosecution may have to deal with the consequences of what the federal government did first.
Think about that for a moment.
A man walks up behind another man on a New York City sidewalk and shoots him.
The victim dies.
The accused later stands in federal court and admits that he was the shooter.
Yet because of the complicated interaction between federal prosecution, New York law and dual sovereignty, our justice system could conceivably reach the end of this case without Luigi Mangione ever having the word murder attached to a conviction.
That doesn’t mean Mangione walks free.
It doesn’t mean he has been declared innocent.
And it certainly doesn’t make Brian Thompson any less dead.
It means something considerably more uncomfortable: sometimes the pursuit of the biggest possible prosecution can make the simplest form of justice harder to achieve.
There is another aspect of this case that has bothered me from almost the beginning.
Somewhere along the way, Luigi Mangione stopped being treated in certain corners of our culture simply as a man accused of shooting a husband and father in the back.
He became a symbol.
Then a celebrity.
Then, remarkably, something resembling a folk hero.
There were T-shirts. Memes. Fan accounts. Admirers outside courthouses. Online commentary about his appearance. A proceeding concerning the killing of a human being occasionally began to resemble entertainment.
Meanwhile, the victim slowly disappeared from the story.
Brian Thompson became “the insurance CEO.”
A title.
A corporation.
A representation of an industry many Americans dislike.
Luigi Mangione became a personality.
That’s a dangerous inversion.
You can despise the American healthcare system. You can believe insurance companies have treated people terribly. You can demand reform, accountability and fundamental changes to the way healthcare is delivered and paid for in this country.
None of those things gives anyone the right to become judge, jury and executioner on a Manhattan sidewalk.
A civilized society cannot decide that murder becomes morally negotiable depending upon how unpopular the victim’s profession happens to be.
And perhaps that is why the possibility of Mangione never being convicted of murder feels so strange.
The law is supposed to be precise. Sometimes maddeningly so. Constitutional protections exist for very good reasons, including when applying them produces outcomes we don’t particularly like.
If New York law ultimately prevents another prosecution, courts should follow the law rather than bend it because the defendant is unpopular.
But prosecutors should also ask themselves how we arrived here.
Was justice better served by multiple governments racing to build the biggest possible case?
Or would justice have been better served by doing something considerably less dramatic?
Prosecute the killing.
Prove the murder.
Obtain the conviction.
Remember the victim.
When I wrote previously about dual sovereignty, the doctrine raised an important constitutional question: How many times should government get to prosecute one person for essentially the same conduct?
The Mangione case presents the other side of that question.
What happens when two governments both want their shot at a defendant—and, in the process, one prosecution potentially jeopardizes the other?
That isn’t merely a law-school hypothetical anymore.
Brian Thompson walked down a Manhattan street one December morning.
Luigi Mangione has admitted that he shot him.
And somehow, after federal prosecutors, state prosecutors, dismissed charges, guilty pleas and competing sovereigns have all had their turn, the most complicated question remaining may be the one that once seemed the easiest:
Will anyone ever convict Luigi Mangione of murder?
The Valley Viewpoint
The Valley Viewpoint 