One year after the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, the court is now weighing whether police violated alleged gunman Luigi Mangione’s Miranda rights.
One year after the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, the court is now weighing whether police violated alleged gunman Luigi Mangione’s Miranda rights.
That’s actually a much bigger deal for Mangione at this hearing than the Miranda warning issue.
That seems like more of an uphill battle. Even if the search incident to arrest is illegal, the defense also has to prove that the feds would not have inevitably gotten the search warrant for the backpack anyway.
The sequence of events with the backpack was:
12 minutes into the McDonald’s interaction, the cops moved the backpack some distance away from him, and put themselves between Mangione and the backpack.
While still in the McDonald’s a local cop opened the backpack, searched all the inside compartments, and found the key items, including the gun. The cops say this was an inventory search incident to arrest.
She then put the gun back in the backpack and zipped it back up. This is a clue that the cops were actually worried about the legality of the search.
They took the whole backpack back to the police station.
The same cop then searched the backpack again at the police station, and magically found the same gun that she had put back into the backpack. Still no warrant.
7 hours later, Altoona PD applied for and received a warrant to search the backpack.
Despite the preposterousness of this sequence, if the prosecution can show that the team that applied for the warrant was not excessively tainted by prior knowledge of the gun or notebook, they can probably still use the evidence.
The issue is with the initial search. They can only search after they have the warrant, and they allegedly made the arrest knowing they would find a gun, and then got the warrant, and then “found” the gun again.
Even if they claim that as long as they did find the gun, it means they were right - the problem is that, had they not known about the gun, they wouldn’t have had grounds to arrest him, and therefore they wouldn’t have a conviction. That sounds fine as long as you do find a murderer, but not for everyone else they search like that with no warrant.
Even assuming the gun was real and not planted, the legal issue is that they can’t be allowed to fish for anyone they want, even if they happen to land on the right guy - after countless other innocents. Forcing them to let an actual murderer free would, presumably, push them to think twice before violating random people’s rights.
And after that, they have to prove somehow that the gun wasn’t planted while they had the bag and the owner couldn’t check on them.