Weighing in on the Luigi Mangione case, Greg Germain, an experienced attorney, said he feels that the only option for Luigi Mangione is to claim insanity. Germain, an attorney with over 30 years of experience, told Newsweek that he doesn’t believe that it would eventually become a case of jury nullification, where a jury acquits the accused out of sympathy for them or for the cause.
Luigi Mangione, the 26-year-old accused killer of Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, has pleaded not guilty to the first-degree and second-degree murder charges. He also faces federal murder charges that could carry the death penalty.
Mangione is the center of an Internet frenzy where social media users are hailing him as a hero, as Jesus for avenging the death of many Americans denied of their health insurance payout on time possibly from Brian Thompson’s company. Though Mangione has a severe spinal issue, he was never a consumer of UnitedHealthcare and probably acted as a vigilante in killing the CEO of the company.
Germain said that despite the online lionization of the accused, it is unlikely that a jury will let Mangione walk free from a murder charge. Despite the grudges against the insurance companies, killing would never be pardoned and the only defence Mangione’s legal team will have is insanity.
“It’s hard for me to imagine jury nullification. People may not like their health insurance companies, but I don’t think they will condone murdering insurance executives in the street,” he said. “The prosecution will show the jury that he (Brian Thompson) was a human being who was ambushed.”
“The only possible defense I could imagine is insanity, which is very hard to establish in a planned case like this,” Germain said.
Karen Friedman Agnifilo and her husband Marc Agnifilo are in Luigi Mangione’s legal team and in the last hearing Karen Agnifilo expressed her concerns that her client was being treated as political fodder, as a human ping-pong ball.
Former US attorney Nick Ackerman told CNN that the evidence is so strong Mangione “can’t claim innocence based on the facts,” and his defense team should move towards an insanity plea. “What you have to do is really dig in deeply, talk to the family members, try and find out what that medical history was that we heard about. How did that impact him? Is there anything out there [that] would give you some kind of a hook on the defense?
What is an insanity plea?
An insanity defence is an argument that the defendant is not responsible for their actions due to a psychiatric disease at the time of the criminal act. For Luigi Mangione, it has to be pleaded by his lawyers that he was not in the right frame of mind when he allegedly killed Brian Thompson.
