Prosecutor Accuses Mangione Attorneys of Flashing Mental Health Strategy to ‘Run Out the Clock’

Prosecutors from the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office accused Luigi Mangione of using a mental health defense as a delay tactic to dismiss the state case against him in the killing of a UnitedHealthcare CEO in December 2024, a transcript published last week revealed.“We see this as nothing other than an attempt after 18 months of doing nothing to try to run out the clock on us,” Assistant District Attorney Joel Seidemann told the court during a conference held behind closed doors on June 3, according to the transcript. Mr. Mangione, 28, is being prosecuted both in state and in federal court for the same crime: the shooting of Brian Thompson on a Midtown Manhattan street in December 2024. The 50-year-old executive and father of two was on his way to attend an annual investor conference at the New York Hilton. The Manhattan District Attorney’s office has charged Mr. Mangione with second-degree murder and weapon charges, while the Southern District of New York has accused him of stalking his victim across state lines. Both trials are scheduled for this fall. Federal and state prosecutors have agreed that the state trial will go first. The defense opposes that order. Both sets of prosecutors are eager to try the high-profile case and the state pushed hard to hold its trial first. Murder cases are mostly prosecuted in state courts, unless an element of the crime includes crossing state lines. Federal prosecutors argue in their indictment that Mr. Mangione’s case rises to the federal level because he stalked Thompson, who traveled from his home state of Minnesota to New York.Defense attorneys would like the New York case to go second because of the state’s strong laws to protect against double jeopardy, which aim to prevent a defendant from being charged with the same crime twice. The state’s constitutional protections are more declarative than the U.S. Constitution, opening up the opportunity for defense attorneys to make a double jeopardy claim and get the state case dismissed. During a June 3 conference, Mr. Seidemann said the mental health defense was a delay tactic “to jeopardy out the case,” as he put it. “That, in essence, is what this is about. It’s plain and simple.” A New York criminal defense attorney who represents clients charged with federal crimes, Elena Fast, told The New York Sun in an email on Sunday afternoon that the defense may have “a strategic incentive to try to reverse the current order (state trial first, federal case second).” “From the defense perspective, it is better for the federal case to go first,” Ms. Fast said. New York’s laws, she wrote, “provide broader protection against successive prosecutions than the federal constitutional double-jeopardy rule.” “If the federal trial occurs first, a later New York prosecution based on the same act or criminal transaction may be barred, subject to statutory exceptions,” Ms. Fast noted. If, however, the trials proceed as scheduled, and the state trial goes first, New York laws would not prevent a prosecution in federal court. “Switching the order so the federal trial proceeds first,” she explained, “could potentially benefit Mr. Mangione. I do not know whether that is what the defense is attempting to do, but from a strategic standpoint, there is little downside in trying.” Last Wednesday, Mr. Mangione’s defense attorneys publicly announced their intent to argue their client was “emotionally disturbed during the occurrence” of the crime. By declaring a mental health defense, they effectively admit that Mr. Mangione committed the killing, but claims he cannot not be held responsible because he was “emotionally disturbed” at the time. If a jury agrees with that defense, Mr. Mangione will not be acquitted of the crime, Ms. Fast said. Instead his second-degree murder charge would be reduced to manslaughter.“Rather, it reduces murder to manslaughter,” she said, adding, “The practical impact is substantial: a successful defense can reduce sentencing exposure from 15 years to life for murder to 5 to 25 years in prison for manslaughter.” In a surprising move, the defense team retracted the mental health defense in a letter filed at Manhattan Criminal Court on Thursday, one day after its notice to the court. As a result, New York Supreme Court Justice Gregory Carro, who oversees the state case, ordered that the documents regarding Mr. Mangione’s psychiatric and medical records remain sealed. However, he published a redacted transcript of the June 3rd closed-door conference held between the parties. That transcript revealed that the defense had first mentioned filing a psychiatric defense notice last September. “We served notice of our intention of exploring this defense on September 30th of 2025, nine months ago,” Mr. Mangione’s lead defense attorney, Karen Friedman Agnifilo, told the judge, according to the transcript. She argued that the reason why her team had kept this notice sealed for such a long time was “due to the high publicity in this case.” She didn’t want to prejudice the jury pool, she said, and she wasn’t sure if her team was actually going with that defense. One of the biggest hurdles to the mental health defense, Ms. Friedman Agnifilo said, was that her team did not know whether or not to argue Mr. Mangione was emotionally disturbed “because we are still in the process of testing Mr. Mangione to determine what we will be doing.” “I am going to stop you,” Judge Carro said, according to the transcript. “You haven’t completed your testing?” The defense attorney confirmed that her client had not been examined by an expert yet, and that in addition to that delay her team had faced difficulties in gathering Mr. Mangione’s medical records. “We had to obtain voluminous medical records that we have had to gather from multiple states. This is not New York or Maryland only. This is multiple states throughout the country,” Ms. Friedman Agnifilo said. Mr. Mangione was born and raised in Maryland, hailing from an influential and prominent real estate family in the Baltimore area. According to archived posts from a Reddit account tied to the defendant, Mr. Mangione was first diagnosed with a severe spinal condition, known as spondylolisthesism, in 2022. While the underlying defect — such as a stress fracture in the spinal bone — could have originated during childhood or adolescence, his condition was formally identified after a surfing accident in Hawaii. Numerous media outlets reported that Mr. Mangione sought medical help and underwent spinal fusion surgery in July 2023. Afterward, he was reportedly in chronic and prolonged pain.It’s unclear if the defense team was trying to obtain records related to Mr. Mangione’s spinal condition. All medical details were redacted in the transcript. However, Ms. Friedman Agnifilo told the court that her team had encountered difficulties obtaining records from “medical facilities.” She also said that because of “the notoriety of this case, some doctors have refused to cooperate, which is required as to go through the interstate subpoena process and through their attorneys and have litigation in that regard.” These procedural hurdles, Ms. Friedman Agnifilo said, had forced her team to keep the mental health defense notice under wraps for so long. “Until we know the extent of his medical issues, we are simply not in a position yet to know whether we can and will move forward with this defense and whether we will call an expert. And the People have demanded a report from an expert, yet no expert can write a report until all this testing is completed,” Ms. Friedman Agnifilo said on June 3 before announcing — and reversing — the intention to proceed with the mental health defense. The prosecutor was not convinced. “In my 41 years,” Mr. Seidemann responded on June 3, according to the transcript. “I have never seen such a notice sealed nor is there any statutory or case law authority for such a notice to be sealed.”He faulted the defense for not sharing its medical records with prosecutors. “It’s clear that counsel has had in its possession medical records that they may seek to rely upon, and they’re playing hide the ball,” Mr. Seidemann said. “Reciprocal discovery should mean reciprocal discovery. It shouldn’t be a one-way street. We’ve turned over terabytes of information and have gotten nothing in return.” Judge Carro assured the prosecutor that the trial would begin as scheduled on September 8 and that he was not going to permit any kind of delays. He ordered the defense to unseal all records by Thursday, June 18 — the same day, the defense withdrew its notice.“The potential benefits of withdrawing the notice now include avoiding a court-ordered psychiatric examination by the prosecution’s expert and preventing disclosure of psychiatric records currently in the defense’s possession,” Ms. Fast explained in her email on Sunday. She further said that the current retraction did not prohibit the defense from refiling the notice again at a later date, though she empathized that the judge could then reject the motion. “(B)ecause the statute says the court ‘may’ permit late filing, rather than ‘shall’ or ‘must,’ the defense would need to show good cause, and the judge could deny a later notice if the prosecution would be prejudiced,” Ms. Fast wrote. During the June 3 conference, Mr. Mangione’s attorney pushed back against the accusation that she was using a delay tactic, telling the judge that was “absolutely not what is happening.” She then accused the prosecutor of not obtaining the records himself. “Mr. Seidemann has been a prosecutor for four decades and he’s an expert in many areas. In particular, he is an expert in the area of psychiatric defenses,” said Ms. Friedman Agnifilo, who worked as a prosecutor alongside Mr. Seidemann at the Manhattan District Attorney’s office before joining her husband’s private law firm, Agnifilo Intrater. The biggest concern regarding the mental health defense, however, appears to be the federal case. Ms. Friedman-Agnifilo said during the June 3 conference as well as in open court on June 17 that her team cannot raise the same emotional disturbance argument in federal court. Ms. Fast agreed. “Evidence that could persuade a New York jury that a defendant was acting under an extreme emotional disturbance may still fall well short of establishing federal insanity,” she wrote. “That difference may become one of the most significant strategic challenges in the case.” “Federal court is much less forgiving,” added Ms. Fast, who prosecuted cases for the Kings County District Attorney’s Office at Brooklyn before opening her private practice. The federal insanity standard, she said, is “considerably more demanding than New York’s extreme emotional disturbance doctrine, both in terms of the severity of the required mental condition and the burden of proof.” Mr. Mangione’s next hearing is scheduled in federal court for June 29, at which time the parties are expected to discuss the questionnaire for jury selection.

Prosecutor Accuses Mangione Attorneys of Flashing Mental Health Strategy to ‘Run Out the Clock’

Prosecutor Accuses Mangione Attorneys of Flashing Mental Health Strategy to ‘Run Out the Clock’

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