Prosecutors, Defense Expected To Spar Over Luigi Mangione’s Backpack, Seized at McDonald’s, in New ‘Suppression Hearing’

Luigi Mangione, accused of gunning down the CEO of UnitedHealthcare Brian Thompson will appear in federal court for his suppression hearing on Friday. Meanwhile, his defense attorneys raised additional arguments on Wednesday in their attempt to eliminate the death penalty eligible charge from the federal indictment, citing a recent decision from the Ninth Circuit. “He’s got a hell of a defense team, and they’re making some very interesting arguments,” the Los Angeles criminal defense attorney and Fox News contributor, Joshua Ritter, told Fox News in an article published on Wednesday, referring to Mr. Mangione. Mr. Mangione is represented by Karen Friedman Agnifilo, her husband, Marc Agnifilo, and Jacob Kaplan, from Agnifilo Intrater, and death penalty expert Avi Moskowitz, who represented the Pakistani terrorist, Ramzi Yousef, convicted of being one of the perpetrators and masterminds in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing in New York, an attack that killed six people and injured more than 1,000.Mr. Mangione,he 27-year old Ivy-League graduate and high school valedictorian from the Baltimore area, faces charges in three separate jurisdictions for shooting Thompson, a Minnesota father of two, on a Midtown Manhattan street on December 4, 2024: At Manhattan criminal court, in Pennsylvania, where he was arrested five days after the shooting, and at the Southern District, where federal prosecutors have charged him with “murder through the use of a firearm,” which is death penalty eligible. Mr. Mangione has pleaded not guilty to all charges. Luigi Mangione, seated between his attorneys Jacob Kaplan (L) and Marc Agnifilo (R) attends a suppression of evidence hearing in the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in Manhattan Criminal Court on December 18, 2025. Shannon Stapleton-Pool/Getty ImagesLast April, Attorney General Pam Bondi publicly stated that she intends to pursue the death penalty in Mr. Mangione’s case. But the defense team is questioning if legal technicalities in the indictment could be grounds to dismiss the death penalty eligible charge, arguing that the two predicate acts are not crimes of violence. “Murder by itself is not a federal law. It’s a state law. You have to connect it to a federal law that is a predicate act,” An federal appeals attorney, who declined to give his name, explained to the Sun on Monday. The predicate acts in the four count federal indictment are count one and count two, interstate stalking and interstate cyberstalking. Count one alleges that Mr. Mangione “traveled from Georgia to New York… for the purpose of stalking and killing Brian Thompson,” and count two alleges that Mr. Mangione “used a cellphone, interstate wires, interstate highways, and the Internet to plan and carry out the stalking, shooting, and killing…” the indictment reads.The defense argues that the stalking statutes do not meet the “crimes of violence” requirement, because stalking is not an inherently violent crime. A person can stalk a victim without using any physical force, meaning the offense can be “committed through conduct intended to ‘harass’ or conduct intended to ‘intimidate’ even if that conduct is not violent in nature.” The defense attorneys wrote in their motion filed last October. Objects seized from Luigi Mangione at his arrest a year ago are seen in images released by law enforcement. Altoona Police Department / Getty ImagesFederal prosecutors disagreed, writing in their reply that the fact that the stalking “resulted in the death of the victim” makes it a crime of violence. On January 9, the presiding district judge, Margaret Garnett, held a hearing, as the Sun reported. During the lengthy oral arguments, the parties also discussed the question of “knowing use of force.” The defense argued that a crime can only be considered violent if the defendant committed it with a purposeful or knowing threat of physical force. A few days after the hearing, on January 13, the Ninth Circuit, U.S. Federal Court of Appeals, found in United States v. Gomez that an armed assault was not a crime of violence because it was committed recklessly and not intentionally. On Wednesday, Mr. Mangione’s defense attorneys filed a letter to the district judge, who has yet to rule, citing the Ninth Circuit’s decision as further “supplemental authority… in support” of their argument. A red notebook seized from Luigi Mangione: defense lawyers are seeking to have the prosecution barred from calling it a ‘manifesto.” Altoona Police DepartmentA defense attorney from Philadelphia, David Gelman, told Fox News that the Ninth Circuit is “the most liberal circuit court in the land,” adding that it also has “the highest overturn rate out of all the circuits.”It is unclear how Judge Garnett will rule in Mr. Mangione’s matter. The Southern District is not bound by the Ninth Circuit. If either party wants to appeal her decision, they would need to go to the Second Circuit, which according to the attorney the Sun spoke to, has not ruled on this question at all. “They are courts that have ruled in both directions,” the attorney told the Sun. “There are a series of cases in which the Supreme Court decided on the question if various issues are crimes of violence.” The attorney cited the 2022 case United States v. Taylor, in which the Supreme Court held that an attempted robbery does not qualify as a “crime of violence,” because there is no element of the attempt that involves the use of force. An officer from the Altoona, Pennsylvania police department asks Luigi Mangione his name at the McDonald’s. Altoona Police DepartmentBut before Judge Garnett can direct her full attention to this tricky death penalty matter, she has asked to hear testimony on Friday from an officer from the Altoona Police Department, from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, to determine whether or not the contents of Mr. Mangione’s backpack can be included as evidence at the upcoming federal trial.Mr. Mangione was arrested at an Altoona McDonald’s, about 270 miles west of New York City, five days after Thompson was fatally shot. Defense attorneys argue that the arrest violated their client’s due process rights, because Mr. Mangione’s backpack was searched without a warrant. Inside the backpack, officers found a magazine loaded with bullets, which, according to New York detectives match the shell casings found at the crime scene, a 3D-printed handgun, a red notebook, which includes disparaging writing against the health insurance system, as well as several USB sticks, lose notes that appeared to be a pencil-drawn escape map, and more than $7,000 dollars in cash. The suppression hearings regarding the evidence that were held at Manhattan Criminal Court in December lasted three weeks. Prosecutors called numerous Altoona police officers, who had been involved in the arrest, who all testified that they followed police procedures when they searched the backpack, citing the “search incident to an arrest” regulation that permits the search of an arrested person and their immediate surroundings without a warrant, primarily for officers’ and the public’s safety. Judge Garnett wrote in her order that the testifying officer does not need to have been present during Mr. Mangione’s arrest but that he must have experience and knowledge of the arrest procedures. She also expected the suppression hearing to be “brief.”

Prosecutors, Defense Expected To Spar Over Luigi Mangione’s Backpack, Seized at McDonald’s, in New ‘Suppression Hearing’

Prosecutors, Defense Expected To Spar Over Luigi Mangione’s Backpack, Seized at McDonald’s, in New ‘Suppression Hearing’

More from the New York Sun

Ram Has Resurrected a V8-Powered Flying Dinosaur

Anti-Jeffries Petition Tops 1 Million Signatures as Progressives Seek a More Combative Speaker

Hochul and Mamdani Celebrate Democratic Election Gains, Not at Home but in Puerto Rico

Zoo Atlanta’s New Pandas Steal the Spotlight in Public Debut

GOP Lawmakers Erupt Over Trump’s Promotion of Stephen Miller

Incoming Texas Democrats May Flip Policies on Abortion, Data Centers, Schools

Scaling ‘Heights’ Higher Than ‘Hamilton’

Calls To End Schumer’s Reign Grow Louder but Viable Challengers Fail To Materialize

More from the New York Sun

Ram Has Resurrected a V8-Powered Flying Dinosaur

Anti-Jeffries Petition Tops 1 Million Signatures as Progressives Seek a More Combative Speaker

Hochul and Mamdani Celebrate Democratic Election Gains, Not at Home but in Puerto Rico

Zoo Atlanta’s New Pandas Steal the Spotlight in Public Debut

GOP Lawmakers Erupt Over Trump’s Promotion of Stephen Miller

Incoming Texas Democrats May Flip Policies on Abortion, Data Centers, Schools

Scaling ‘Heights’ Higher Than ‘Hamilton’

Calls To End Schumer’s Reign Grow Louder but Viable Challengers Fail To Materialize