r/FreeLuigi

Luigi Mangione has pled guilty to shooting and killing UnitedHealth CEO Brian Thompson on a Manhattan sidewalk on December 4, 2024. The killing went viral. The NYPD deployed hundreds of officers to hunt him down.
Corporate media covered every detail of his arrest, his appearance, his manifesto, his trial.

The legal system spoke swiftly, loudly, and with the full weight of the state and federal government behind it.
But here's the question corporate media will never ask: In those same 624 days since Brian Thompson was killed, how many Americans died preventable deaths because HELL Corporations-Health Exploitation Limited Liability Corporations—prioritized profit over their lives?

I did the math. A new study by the Yale School of Public Health finds that a single-payer universal healthcare system could cover all 330M+ Americans, save more than 100,000 lives annually, and still cost $1 trillion less than the current system.

That is 274 preventable deaths every single day.
Over 624 days since Brian Thompson's death, that is
170,958 preventable deaths.

Luigi Mangione is in federal custody. The CEOs who enabled the deaths of 170,958 Americans are in their corner offices, collecting bonuses, and gracing the covers of Forbes and Fortune. Does it have to be this way?

done with a 1.4 cm brain lesion. anything is possible

Friday was deeply emotional,” says R.J. Martin, Mangione’s friend and former landlord in Hawaii, where Mangione lived after college. “Beyond the noise, Luigi is a human being with a circle of longtime friends who know who he is, stay in touch, and care about him deeply.

A former friend of Mangione’s who did extracurricular computer programming with Mangione in high school says he found it “really weird” to hear the guilty plea, calling it a “stark shift” from the Mangione he used to know.

“He never struck me as a political person,” says R.K., who asked to use only his initials. "I think it speaks to the radicalization in this country in the current day."

R.K. says he finds the crime “unacceptable and deeply sad” but says he hopes the guilty plea doesn’t stop the conversation about Americans’ frustration with the healthcare system. “I’ve experienced the difference firsthand as a foreigner living in this country,” says R.K.

The fact that he will hear Brian Thompson's family's victim impact statements but they will NEVER hear and never care about the impact BT had on thousands and thousands of people who either lost their lives, or live with illnesses while constantly battling their insurance company. Not saying he shouldn't have to listen to the impact statement, but it will likely torment him as he seems to have a conscience that health insurance CEO's and their families sorely lack.

As someone who's been through the system - arguably not to the extent as Luigi - I totally understand the mindset behind his decision to plead guilty today upon the federal charges. While the media can attempt to spin this various ways, at the end of the day it was his legal right to enter a plea at any time, either federally or at the state level, and his doing so today was likely not as complicated a decision as many analysts are making it out to be.

IMO a heart to heart conversation occured between him and his defense team where they made it clear that best case scenario was him spending the rest of his life in prison one way or another. That then begs the question, where do you want to serve your time? As someone with experience in doing that, I can tell you that if I had been faced with the option to serve time federally versus in the state system, I would have gone federal all the way - especially if the state option was a shithole state like New York.

For Luigi, the tradeoff here is basically not much. His defense team had already scored some major wins for him such as getting the terrorism charged dropped, getting the death penalty off the table as an option, and also removing the mandatory life sentence mandate as well. What does that leave left? Overwhelming odds of a life in prison sentence. So where did Luigi want to do his time? Well, choosing the feds versus the state was the best decision he could have made quite frankly.

The trade off is that in the feds he loses any possibility of "parole" like he would have had in the state (but that he likely wouldn't have been granted anyway), however in accepting responsibility for this event shows as a mitigating factor to the feds and therefore can help in reduce his sentence under the federal sentencing guidelines. If he'd gone the state route, well, yes he could have gotten as low as 25 years and likely would have had much more. 25 years in a state prison feels more like 50 because it's hard time, day in and day out. But 25 years in the feds, or even 30, or 40, or more? He will experience a greater quality of life to whatever extent possible in the federal system as opposed to the state system and therefore, the time may not "feel" quite as long in the end.

That right there is enough to make anyone decide to go feds over state. But then take into consideration the fact that his federal charges of Interstate Stalking aren't actually considered a violent crime. This is huge for him when it comes to being classified a security level in the federal system and dictates how he will be evaluated throughout his entire stay in the federal system. Today, Luigi is not technically and legally speaking a "convicted murderer". He's simply a convicted stalker (which resulted in death) but that charge does not directly imply from a legal standing that he commited the person's death and therefore it's not a violent crime, technically. Had he plead guilty in the state case? He'd be a convicted murderer for life and treated as such forever in the system. But as a convicted stalker in the federal system, while he'll initially, likely, be sent to a ​high security facility, as time moves on he can work his way down levels. Each level down offers a better quality of life over time. I have no idea how the New York corrections do classifications for inmates but I'm sure it's not unlike most other states in the sense that it's highly arbitrary and basically you're at the whim of the folks who are classifying you at any given time. The feds is much more structured and they use a point system.

In the FBOP (FEDERAL BUREAU OF PRISONS), ​someone convicted of a bona fide murder can, and likely will eventually, with good behavior and the passage of time, be classified down far enough to reach minimum or low security. The only catch is that to be sent to a federal prison camp (un fenced facility) a person must be within 10 years of their release date and any person serving a life sentence for any reason is automatically barred from a camp - but not necessarily barred from the lowest classification level. If Luigi receives any sentence other than life in the feds, he will probably see minimum or low security one day and very well could eventually be sitting in an un fenced prison camp near the end of his sentence in his old age. This would be a much better way for him to do time as in the state prison, they would probably keep him in maximum security for who knows how long - 10, maybe 20 years, or more? Or forever? He'd likely see medium security eventually and maybe even minimum security closer to release. But it would be a much longer road for him to get there in the state system for sure.

In the feds, he will have a higher quality of Healthcare, food, recreation, programming, employment or education opportunities, etc., then he would in the state. Giving up a slight possibility of parole from the state in trade for this is very wise. Even if, on the off chance that his state case does not completely go away, since he went to the feds first, the feds is now where he'll serve his time forever even if states add on more convictions. The order of operation here in cases like this is incredibly important. The only way he'd ever see a state prison now is if he gets anything less than life from the feds and the state hands down some type of consecutive (non-concurrent) sentence. Meaning, you serve all your fed time first in full, then transfer to state for state time. It would be very rare for this to happen. Usually once someone receives a long federal sentence, the state just agrees to run whatever time they give out concurrently and not consecutively. The "big time" from the feds (longer sentence) then "eats" the little time up. Any state time ran concurrently with fed time would essentially be of no practical consequence. Running any type of sentence from a state consecutive to a life sentence or very long sentence from the feds is just basically like waiving a flag around saying "look at us, look at what we did, aren't we cool?" But it doesn't mean much more than that. After all, how can anything be consecutive to a life sentence with no parole.

In the end, neither system usually cares what the other system does in practice. I doubt the feds give a rats behind what New York does at this point. New York now only really cares because the feds took the biscuit out of their mouth. But that's usually the way it works. Rarely does a state charge ever trump a federal charge. And with New York's very broad and kind of unique double jeopardy law - which they wrote themselves mind you and put into law - it's pretty unlikely I believe that they will still be able to go through with that case as it stands today. So if New York wants to be mad at the feds well they can actually just redirect their anger at themselves because it's THEIR law. Quite frankly I agree with that law. I never understood how someone could be charged with the same crime more then once in two separate jurisdictions simply because the separate jurisdictions are both sovereign from one another. I think that New York has this law the way it should be, that if the elements of the crime are the same, even if the literal description differs, then double jeopardy applies across all jurisdictions.

"A GiveSendGo spokesperson tells TMZ the fundraiser was created to cover Mangione's legal defense costs across three separate cases and remains active because he still faces unresolved legal matters."

https://www.givesendgo.com/luigi-defense-fund

hi guys!! i actually shared some of this in the replies on another post on here, but i thought i’d share it here as well.

i’ve seen some confusion on other media platforms as to why LM would admit to the shooting in federal court if he “only had to admit to stalking,” and i thought i’d pass on the explanation i saw + my own understanding of everything after reading more into the federal case law :)

so i follow a lawyer on tumblr who supports LM and always breaks down things relating to his case, and she explained how his statement had lawyer language all over it and was essentially just a check list of him admitting guilt to each element of the stalking charges, which he has to do in order for the judge to accept his plea and also for the NY double jeopardy law to be triggered. she thinks that’s why his wording was so intentional, using words like “traveled,” “intent”, “fear of bodily harm or death,” “illegal,” etc. i actually read the penal code myself, and it’s basically verbatim what he said. the stalking has to include:

travel across state lines ✅
with the intent to kill, harm, or harass ✅
and the conduct places the victim in reasonable fear of bodily harm or death ✅

his statement reflects all of these elements, saying he traveled from outside of NY state, with the intent to kill BT, and he knew it would place BT in fear of bodily harm/death.

this is also why he said “i shot BT and he died,” because both of these federal stalking charges include the element of “resulting in death.” to my understanding, the “resulting in death” element doesn’t necessarily have to mean outright murder, just that the stalking conduct eventually led to the victim’s death in one way or another. again, in order for his plea to be accepted, LM had to admit that his stalking conduct resulted in BT’s death, which he did through that statement. that’s also why he didn’t frame it as “i murdered BT,” because these federal charges have nothing to do with murder, and he pleaded guilty to stalking, not murder.

obviously there’s a lot of nuances here, and we all know the implication. BUT from a strictly legal standpoint, he just adhered to the exact stalking statutes and didn’t actually admit to anything more than he had to. all he did was admit to each element of the stalking + that the stalking led to the shooting, which led to BT’s death, hence “stalking resulting in death.” think of it kind of like a sequence of events, maybe?

there’s also been a lot of uproar over LM saying “i knew what i was doing was illegal,” vs. “i knew what i was doing was wrong,” which are two totally different things. i think that he very well could’ve chosen his words for the reasons we all suspect— a morality vs. law type of scenario, or him not believing what he did was morally wrong, just barred by the law. but i sat and thought about it for a while, and thought that maybe he could’ve chosen the word “illegal” to also reflect that he understood the consequences of his actions. this would mean that he’s not insane in legal speak and understands right from wrong, which really boils down to legal from illegal in terms of the courts. but obviously him and his legal team are the only ones who know the reasoning, and that word could’ve been said for a combination of reasons. either way, i think it was a great choice 🤭

one more thing i want to discuss:

what does this mean for the double jeopardy argument?

from my knowledge (i am not a legal expert lol but i did read a lot about NY DJ and the exceptions), it sounds like his defense team will need to successfully prove a few things in order for the NY state case to be tossed due to double jeopardy. whether all of these things actually have to be proven or just one needs to be is unknown to me, but i’d assume that the more they can prove, the stronger the argument would obviously be. but in my head, one should suffice?

anyway, according to NY DJ, i’d say this is what the defense could argue:

a) the federal stalking charges + state murder and weapons charges all come from the same crime, criminal transaction, underlying conduct, etc. (aka, the killing of BT).

b) the federal and state charges have “substantially similar elements” AND/OR that the charges prevent the same kind of “harm or evil.”

i would say that the second degree murder charge is much more likely to go, since it could be argued that the murder charge and stalking resulting in death charges both prevent the same evil of intentionally taking a life + both have the element of an intent to kill (which sounds like the same thing lol but i’d imagine they could be argued as separate points because they kind of are). and again, the stalking and murder could be argued as being a part of the same overall crime or act, and the weapons charges could be argued the same way since the gun was possessed solely to carry out the murder. he also admitted in his statement to printing/having the gun before he crossed state lines into NY, which i think could’ve been intentionally said to trigger DJ for the weapons charges specifically. veryyy strategic if you ask me.

i do think that the weapons charges will be a bit harder to argue for the defense just because the elements of stalking and weapons are nowhere near similar, but they could still argue that it’s part of the same criminal transaction as the stalking and murder. the NY prosecution will likely fight this and say that the charges are substantially different enough, etc, but we’ll just have to see how it goes.

i didn’t read the entire motion that his defense filed about DJ, but i skimmed it, and it seems like they’re mainly running with the argument of the charges all being part of the exact same crime, against the exact same person, on the exact same day, in the exact same city, etc, hence LM technically already being prosecuted for the crime itself now that he pleaded guilty in federal court.

KFA’s statement after the hearing on 8/14 also seems to be pushing back against the dual sovereignty doctrine, which is what initially eradicated their previous DJ arguments. typically, the dual sovereignty doctrine is an exception to DJ because the federal and state courts are considered separate jurisdictions and their own free standing entities, meaning people can be prosecuted in both jurisdictions for the same crime. the thing about that is that normally, federal and state court work separately. however, KFA is arguing that they worked together in this case to both prosecute LM and i think she mentioned how they allowed the state trial to go first solely to avoid DJ? this argument seems to insinuate that in this case, the two courts were not separate because they worked together and therefore dual sovereignty doesn’t work here.

i just wanted to share this and my thoughts because i found all of this to be really interesting, and i initially was confused myself as to why he admitted to the shooting in federal court when the murder charge was dropped months ago. but hopefully this all makes sense and i’m sorry if i didn’t explain it well lol 😅

TLDR: LM’s statement was clearly very intentional and was required in order for his plea to be accepted. he admitted to each element of the federal stalking charges, which included him needing to admit to the shooting as well. in a technical, legal sense, he did not admit to murder, just that the stalking resulted in BT’s death. there’s no way to know how the double jeopardy argument could go, but i would predict that the second degree murder charge is more likely to be dropped than the weapons. but hopefully they’re both dropped and judge carro stops being a partial little bitch.

His last line almost makes it worth it.

"In Nov. 2024 I traveled from outside of New York State to Manhattan. I then emailed UHC leadership posing as an investor at a firm managing over $50 billion in assets and requesting information about the conference."

"Unlike my previous interactions with insurers, I received an immediate response within an hour."

French person here. How can we support? Can we send money directly to him to ease his life in prison or help pay his lawyers? Can we send gifts? What can people from overseas do to help?