United States: details of the indictment of Luigi Mangione, accused of killing CEO Brian Thompson

Luigi Mangione, accused of killing the CEO of the insurance company UnitedHealthcare, Brian Thompson, in New York, was indicted this Tuesday by a grand jury of first-degree murder, a charge usually reserved for the murder of police officers or for serial killers.

The prosecution’s indictment in New York Supreme Court indicates that Mangione killed Thompson in “promotion of an act of terrorism” that “was intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population, influence the policies of a unit of government by intimidation or coercion and affecting human life”.

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Mangione, 26, faces a total of eleven charges in New York, including Two counts of second-degree murder are included, one of them as a crime of terrorism “for the brazen, selective and premeditated shooting of Brian Thompson,” Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg explained in a press conference..

In this sense, he stressed that the objective of the murder was to “cause terror”: “This was not an ordinary murder.”

The defendant faces a maximum penalty of life in prison on charges of first- and second-degree murder as a terrorism crime (there is no death penalty in New York), said New York Police Department Commissioner Jessica Tisch.

Mangione is also charged with seven other charges related to the possession of weapons and another for possession of “a forged instrument.”

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The prosecutor added that, after seeing the photos of the suspect in the Manhattan hotel where he was staying, the Police contacted Mangione’s mother, who had previously reported him missing, and she “did not indicate that the person in the photograph was his son” but admitted that Thompson’s murder is something “I could see him doing.”

JEFF SWENSEN/Getty Images via AFP

Mangione keeps expected a hearing this Thursday morning in Pennsylvania in which his extradition to New York will be discussed: “We have indications that the accused may waive that hearing”said Bragg.

On the other hand, Tisch criticized the growing displays of support for Mangione on social networks: “We have witnessed a horrifying and atrocious celebration of a cold-blooded murder (…). There is no heroism in what Mangione did. It was a “Senseless act of violence, a cold and calculated crime that stole a life.”

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