Federal prosecutors said Friday that they won’t challenge a judge’s order dismissing the two death penalty-eligible counts previously filed against accused healthcare CEO assassin Luigi Mangione while the case proceeds toward trial later this year.
The government’s Friday evening filing was a single sentence long: “The government writes, in accordance with the court’s instructions at the pretrial conference on Jan. 30, 2026, to inform the court that the Department of Justice will not seek interlocutory review of the court’s order entered that same day … dismissing counts three and four of the indictment.”
Mangione, 27, faces separate state murder charges accusing him of gunning down UnitedHealthcare executive Brian Thompson in late 2024, and the timing of the two trials has been a source of tension.
U.S. District Judge Margaret Garnett of the Southern District of New York scheduled the federal case to begin jury selection in September, with trial starting in October in the now-realized event it was not a capital case. The federal judge said she would not coordinate the timeline with state prosecutors unless they reached out to her directly. “That case is none of my concern,” Garnett said on Jan. 30.
A week later, Acting Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Gregory Carro set a start date of June 8 for the state case, but he said that he’d push it back to Sept. 8 — the same date federal jury selection is currently set to begin — if the federal government would do the same, essentially letting the state trial go first.
In that Feb. 6 hearing, Carro alluded Garnett’s scheduling decision and the previous presumption that the state case would go first. “It appears that the federal government has reneged on their agreement to allow the state to do most of the work on this case,” he said.
In the meantime, at least some members of the Agnifilo Intrater team defending Mangione will have their hands full this spring: Harvey Weinstein has hired three attorneys from the firm to represent him at his third New York rape trial, which will begin in March. Two of the trio, Jacob Kaplan and Marc Agnifilo and Jacob Kaplan, represent Mangione along with attorney Karen Friedman Agnifilo.
A representative for Mangione’s legal team did not immediately reply to a Friday evening request for comment on the government’s filing.
