District Judge in Mangione’s Federal Case To Send Qualifying Questionnaire to 800 Prospective Jurors

The district judge overseeing the federal case against the man accused of killing a UnitedHealthcare CEO has pushed the trial date to January 2027 as the process for selecting an impartial jury in the highly publicized case against Luigi Mangione will include having about 800 potential candidates fill out a lengthy questionnaire. Monday’s court hearing for confirming the trial date was delayed by about 20 minutes due to an elevator malfunction at the Thurgood Marshall Courthouse, located at Lower Manhattan. The building houses the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York as well as the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Mr. Mangione entered the courtroom dressed in beige prison garb. He had been stuck inside an elevator with the U.S. Marshal Service for about 20 minutes, defense attorneys said after the hearing. The 28-year-old Maryland native is currently being held without bail at the Metropolitan Detention Center at Brooklyn. Mr. Mangione is being prosecuted in both state and federal court for crimes related to the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office has charged him with second-degree murder and numerous weapon charges. Jury selection for the state trial is scheduled to begin at New York County Supreme Court on September 8. Meanwhile, federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York have accused Mr. Mangione of stalking Thompson across state lines. The 50-year-old executive and father of two had traveled to New York from his home state of Minnesota to attend an annual investor conference. He was gunned down before entering the New York Hilton at Midtown Manhattan in the early hours of December 4, 2024.Mr. Mangione has pleaded not guilty to all charges. He faces maximum sentences of life in prison for the interstate stalking charge in federal court and the murder charge in state court.Judge Marget Garnett already told the parties on April 3 that she would push the federal trial to next year to prevent any collision with the state case. On Monday, she asked the lead defense attorney, Karen Friedman Agnifilo, if there had been any adjournments in the state case. After Ms. Agnifilo confirmed that the state trial will begin as planned, the judge finalized her fallback date as the official trial start and scheduled in-person jury selection for January 5, and opening statements for January 25, 2027. Prior to questioning the prospective jurors in person, a process known as voir dire, the judge will ask around 800 candidates to fill out a written questionnaire. People will be called in “batches of 200-250” to the courthouse and instructed with a video message prerecorded by the judge, Judge Garnett explained on Monday. The parties have already begun discussing the questions with the judge. Court documents indicate that over 80 questions have been proposed. In a court filing on May 11, federal prosecutors wrote that some of the questions proposed by the defense were “intrusive.” They cautioned the judge to “balance” inquiries for personal bias against “concerns about juror privacy, juror candor, efficiency, and the risk that questionnaires become vehicles for advocacy rather than neutral screening.” For example, federal prosecutors were concerned with a question inquiring how often a candidate attends religious services. They also described the inquiry about the “ages, genders, occupations, and education histories” of a candidate’s children as “unnecessarily intrusive.” The government did not object to a more general question of whether or not a juror has children.The judge did not reveal which questions she eliminated from the questionnaire and which questions she plans to keep. She told the parties that she will not make the questionnaire public until after the candidates have filled it out and the final group for in-person questioning has been selected. She said she plans to call between 40 and 50 into her courtroom for questioning per day. “I save the biographical questions until I have a qualified batch,” Judge Garnett said, “because we want to have the opportunity to see the jurors in person.” The judge explained further, adding, “I try to engage with the jurors personally to begin to know them and to draw them out as people.” In federal felony cases, judges can dismiss jury candidates based on specific legal disqualifications, approved claims of undue hardship, or “for cause” challenges raised by the attorneys. The parties can also remove candidates without stating a reason by using so-called peremptory strikes. As defined by the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, defense attorneys get 10 peremptory strikes in federal felony cases, while prosecutors get six strikes. Due to the extensive publicity surrounding the case, the judge agreed to select six alternate jurors to have on standby in case any of the 12 seated jurors need to be excused from the bench during or after the trial. She had originally proposed to have four alternates, but the government requested six. For the selection of these six alternates, the judge granted each party an extra strike, amounting to a total of three strikes per party for the alternates. Ms. Friedman Agnifilo asked the judge if her team could add more questions to the questionnaire at a later date depending on the “developments in the state trial or in the world at large.” Judge Garnett granted her request. A criminal defense attorney from Baltimore, Thomas Maronick, explained that it is in the defense’s interest to have as many detailed questions as possible. “The more detailed you ask, the more likely you are to find biases,” Mr. Maronick told The New York Sun. “The less detailed you get, you’re less likely to uncover the biases. That’s better for the state or the government, because people are more likely to have bias in favor of the government,” he said. The objective of using a questionnaire, the defense attorney said, is to “weed out people who have an obvious bias and are obviously not qualified to be jurors on the basis of an empirical objective standard that comes from the questionnaires.” However, Mr. Maronick pointed out that a certain bias doesn’t necessarily mean the candidate is unqualified. “For example,” Mr. Maronick said, “if somebody in your family was killed in a violent crime, it doesn’t mean you’re necessarily not qualified as a juror.” If that experience makes a person “more likely to favor one side over the other,” meaning “the person thinks anybody who has lost a family member to a violent crime must be telling the truth,” the person would not qualify as a juror, Mr. Maronick said. “It’s about cause and effect,” the attorney added, “how a certain experience affects your ability to be fair and impartial.” Mr. Mangione is scheduled to appear at Manhattan Criminal Court to discuss jury selection for his state trial on August 11.

District Judge in Mangione’s Federal Case To Send Qualifying Questionnaire to 800 Prospective Jurors

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