While cross-examining a Pennsylvania deputy police chief, Luigi Mangione’s defense team on Friday sought to convince a federal judge that law enforcement improperly searched his backpack during his December 2024 arrest.
Mangione, who is accused of shooting and killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson outside a hotel in Midtown Manhattan, stole a few glances toward the courtroom half-filled with devout supporters of the raven-haired, 27-year-old defendant, but otherwise was fixed forward and appeared to be taking notes during the hour-and-a-half-long hearing.
At the start of the proceeding, U.S. District Judge Margaret Garnett of the Southern District of New York confirmed that Mangione’s federal trial will begin this year, setting a Sept. 8 jury selection date. The judge hasn’t yet ruled on a defense motion to dismiss the two counts for which the federal government has said it will seek the death penalty. If the charges stand, a capital trial would begin next January; if they’re quashed, trial will start in October.
Central to Friday’s hearing was whether police followed department protocol while detaining Mangione at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania, five days after the Manhattan shooting. Prosecutors called Altoona Police Department Deputy Chief Nathan Snyder, who was not involved in Mangione’s arrest and testified he hadn’t looked at body camera footage, either.
Snyder reviewed several sections of Altoona police’s procedures for arrests, which include taking an inventory of everything a detainee has on them when they’re brought into custody. In Mangione’s case, defense attorneys argue that officers were off-base when they not only searched Mangione’s backpack, which had been moved away from his person at the time of his arrest, but opened and read the contents of his journal — all before getting a search warrant.
On cross-examination, defense attorney Marc Agnifilo pointed out sections of the police manual on searching a person don’t specifically refer to items like bags or backpacks, and instead focus on potential hiding places like jacket linings, hats, pant cuffs — locations on a physical person.
But on direct and re-direct, Snyder said that whether police pick up items as potential evidence, to safeguard a detainee’s valuables or to remove a danger to officers, those belongings must be inventoried and secured.
The deputy chief talked it up to a space issue that “prisoner log” forms list personal items like jewelry and hats, but not backpacks. “We can’t hardly list everything possible,” he said.
He offered no testimony, however, that department policy would instruct officers to read an arrestee’s journal, saying it was “typically not something that would be done.”
At a previous hearing, Garnett pointed out that the government didn’t rely on the journal’s contents in order to get the search warrant that did allow a full examination of Mangione’s backpack. But defense attorney Jacob Kaplan said the order of events was important: Altoona police took photographs of everything in Mangione’s backpack, then federal law enforcement reviewed those before getting the warrant.
Garnett, who reserved ruling on the defense motion to suppress, was quick to remind the parties that Friday’s hearing was narrow.
“I’m not going to allow this to turn into some sort of extension of the state hearing by proxy,” she said, referring to the nine-day evidentiary hearing in Mangione’s separate state case in December.
