It seems obvious that Luigi Mangione murdered Brian Thomson on December 4, 2024. Mr. Thomson was the CEO of UnitedHealthcare. His murder by Mr. Mangione has sparked a wide range of veneration of Mr. Mangione on the internet and otherwise. Please see here...
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cp8nk75vg81o
You can read this report. In short, Mr. Mangione has become a kind of folk hero, with people even buying clothing similar to what he wore on the day of the murder to show their affiliation with him. His infamy has grown.
Mr. Mangione has been charged both federally, and in New York State. The federal charges are of stalking and murder through the use of a firearm, which can net someone the death penalty. The state charges are of with three counts of First Degree Murder in New York, with the last charge asserting that the murder was a terrorist act. The maximum penalty for First Degree Murder, which is a class A-1 felony, is life in prison.
Charges like this at both levels of government are very unusual. They strongly suggest that the federal and state authorities in the United States are trying to throw the book at Mr. Mangione in a way that they would never have done with a normal defendant. It should be obvious that they are sending a message to anyone who would think about copying Mr. Mangione's alleged actions. If the law is meant to protect, these authorities know exactly who the law needs to safeguard.
Mangione has entered a plea of "not guilty".
Does Mr. Mangione has a plausible legal defence?
Let's explore that question at length below.
The Legal Defence of Insanity: As noted, it is very likely that Mr. Mangione committed the act of murder. His defence would therefore have to be based on the "mens rea", or mental element of any crime, which requires proof that a person not only committed a criminal act, but that they also intended to commit the act.
To "beat the rap", Mr. Mangione would have to "plead insanity", or put forward an affirmative defence that he suffers from a mental disease or defect sufficient enough to negate the criminal charges he faces.
A defence of insanity is available in In New York State. The state follows a softened version of what is known as M'Naghten Rule. This is a British Common Law rule which states as follows:
"Every man is to be presumed to be sane, and ... that to establish a defense on the ground of insanity, it must be clearly proved that, at the time of the committing of the act, the party accused was laboring under such a defect of reason, from disease of mind, and not to know the nature and quality of the act he was doing; or if he did know it, that he did not know he was doing what was wrong."
In summary, this test focuses on two possible defences - 1. whether a criminal defendant knew the nature and quality of the act that they had committed, as in, they did not know what they were doing at all, and/or 2. whether they understood right from wrong at the time they committed the crime, as in, they knew what they were doing, but they did not know that it was wrong.
As noted, New York State softened this defence in favour of defendant's by replacing the word "know" as noted above with the word "understand". The effect of this was to broaden the defence so that flight from the crime scene would no longer be considered as proof of knowledge of the crime. Instead, it could be argued that in fleeing the defendant had only a slight or surface knowledge of the fact that she/he had committed a crime, but not an actual understanding of what they had done sufficient to make out the mens rea element of a criminal prosecution. In short, the fact that Mr. Mangione ran away cannot be take of proof that he "understood" that what he had done was a crime.
So how what would a defence of "insanity" look like for Mr. Mangione?
"Insanity", Mangione's World and "BOOM"!: Mangione's claim of insanity would have had to have been in effect at the time of the offence for it to constitute a criminal defence. Any mental illness before or after is irrelevant. So what matters is Mr. Mangione's mental state when he shot Mr. Thomson.
Also, to invoke an insanity defence at the trial itself, Mr. Mangione has to first admit that he committed the act. He can't say that he didn't do it, but if he did, then he was insane! By admitting the act, he would be putting himself in a very precarious legal position simply because, if his insanity defence does not work, he will be found guilty.
There is an exception. If Mr. Mangione enters a not guilty plea and tries to defend himself by denying that he committed the act, and in the course of the trial it becomes obvious that he was, in fact, insane when he committed the crime, then even though he did not specifically plead this, he may still be found not guilty by reason of insanity.
Finally, courts, not medical professionals, decide whether or not someone was actually insane when they committed a crime. Expert witnesses who testify as to the medical aspects of a persons mental state are vital in these cases, but they do not decide the issue - judges and juries do.
Mr. Mangione does not appear to have been operating while in a drugged state, or while severely intoxicated through the consumption of alcohol. A mens rea defence based on severe intoxication is therefore not available to him. There is also no report, as yet, that he suffers from a severe mental illness, such as schizophrenia, which could also be the basis of such a defence.
So how was Mr. Mangione "insane" when he killed Mr. Thomson?
We know that Mangione suffered from physical ailments. Based on news reports, we know that he had claimed on social media that he was in constant pain from a back injury suffered in a surfing accident in 2022. He apparently had back surgery that helped with the issue, but prior to that he had been "terrified" of the implications of his back injury. He also suffered from what he called a "brain fog" that started when he returned to his fraternity in 2023. He also apparently wrote that "It’s absolutely brutal to have such a life-halting issue...The people around you probably won’t understand your symptoms - they certainly don’t for me.”
Secondly, Mangione may have suffered a psychological episode recently. He had cut himself off from his family, and essentially disappeared. His family reported him as missing in San Francisco in November. He was also apprehended with a notebook in which he had written several notes expressing hostility to the health care industry, and toward health industry executives in particular.
Thirdly, and in line with the last point, he may have become a social outsider. For example, he reviewed books online, and his longest and most comprehensive review was of Ted Kaczynski's manifesto. This fellow was know as The Unabomber. He killed three people in a mail bombing campaign that he unleashed on academics across the United States of America from 1978 to 1995. He was caught when he insisted that his manifesto, Industrial Society and its Future, be published promising that if it was published in the New York Times, he would stop the bombings. It was published, and his brother recognized the theses in the work as similar to the thoughts and beliefs of Kaczynski, and turned him in.
If you are interested, the life and times of Ted Kaczynski is here...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Kaczynski
The manifesto of Kaczynski warned of the erosion of human freedom and dignity by modern technologies, and that modern technical society needed to be dismantled. In that respect, Kaczynski may be one of histories great conspiracy theorists. Mangione's review of Industrial Society and its Future is especially chilling. Here it is:
"Clearly written by a mathematics' prodigy. Reads like a series of lemmas on the quality of 21st century life.
It is easy to quickly and thoughtless(ly) write this off as the manifesto of a lunatic, in order to avoid some of the uncomfortable problems it identifies. But it is simply impossible to ignore his prescient many of his predictions about modern society turned out.
He was a violent individual - rightly imprisoned - who maimed innocent people. While these actions tend to be characterized as those of a crazy luddite, however, they are more accurately seen as those of an extreme political revolutionary." (The board of mewetree.blogspot.com read the manifesto when it was first released; Mangione is not entirely wrong regarding Kaczynski's prescience.)
Today, in social media and in less reputable political circles, Mangione has become Kaczynski - an extreme political revolutionary who appears to have murdered in the name of some sort of revolt against "The Man". As noted, his followers are legion!
Mangione's problem is simple - violent revolutionaries are typically not considered to be insane.
So how could Mangione go from being seen as a sympathetic Unabomber admirer and possible copycat, to avoiding prison based on an insanity defence? Enter the internet and social media - see below.
(BTW - Ted Kaczynski refused to plead not guilty by reason of insanity, in spite of being urged to do so by his lawyers, as he did not want to be saddle with the reputation as someone with a mental illness. He was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison to avoid the death penalty as part of a plea deal with prosecutors. He died in 2023, living long enough to see technology evolve to a state that arguable reflected many of his concerns. In pleading not guilty and not pursuing an insanity defence, at least for now, is Mangione doing the same thing as Kaczynski?)
Traditional Insanity: There are two parts to the defence of insanity, as noted above. Of the two parts of the defence of insanity noted above - that the defendant either did not know the nature of the act that they had committed, or that they did not know the difference from right or wrong when they committed the criminal act, Mangione would need to rely on the second of the two. This is because he likely knew that he was shooting someone when he did it - he actually cleared a jam in his firearm, for example. So he would have understood the nature of the act he committed. What he must show is that he did not know what he was doing was wrong when he killed Thomson.
Let's start with a traditional defence of insanity and see where that takes us. We will then consider something more updated and more than a bit "ironic".
Political assassins and others have a long and less-than-honourable history of escaping the noose by being found not guilty by reason of insanity in America. Here are a few that kept their necks intact...
- Richard Lawrence, who tried to shoot Andrew Jackson in 1835;
- Danial Sickles, who shot a US District Attorney named Phillip Barton Key in 1859;
- John Shrank, who shot Teddy Roosevelt in 1912;
- Ezra Pound, found mentally incompetent to stand for trial for treason in 1946; and,
- John Hinckley Jr., who shot Ronald Reagan in 1981.
These people have been found not guilty by reason of insanity after psychiatrists testified as to their mental states, and based on such phenomena as: a belief that the murderer was the heir to the British throne (Lawrence); temporary insanity and rage at finding out that the victim was sleeping with the murder's wife (Sickles); claims that William McKinley appeared to the murderer in a dream and told him to commit the crime (Shrank); and, claims that the treasonous bastards political ramblings were so off-base as to be evidence of mental instability (Pound); and that he committed his crime to impress actress Jodie Foster (Hinckley - one wonders how things would have worked out if he had known that she is gay!?)
Regardless of these notable successes, it is worth noting that amongst non-political, but still notorious murderers - John Wayne Gacy and Jeffery Dahmer - the insanity defence failed, this in spite of the fact that these fellows were obviously totally crazy. In fact, when Dahmer's claim to be insane was rejected, it was widely noted that this could spell the end of the insanity defence in the United States of America for high-profile cases.
And now, we have Mr. Mangione.
Mangione's brain fog, his medical issues and his odd behaviors in the month leading up to the murder could be expanded by medical professionals to something like a mental illness. How he conducted himself on the day of the murder would also tell - was he so calm that it suggested he did not realize the moral implications of what he was doing? Much would depend on how he presented himself at trial, and how his psychiatrists testified on his behalf. He could put his case for insanity forward, and see how it lands with the jury and/or judge.
And it is here that things get interesting.
This case is very high profile, and extremely political - again, the federal and state authorities almost never lay charges in the same case. Many, many people sympathize with the killer of a person who ran a multinational health insurance company with a reputation for squeezing the Little Guy. It is very possible that a jury may not convict Mr. Mangione given their possible sympathy for his "cause". If he entered a new plea of not guilty by reason of insanity, would a jury be convinced to find him non-guilty as a kind of protest against "The Man", and by so doing, keep him out of jail?
As noted by "Wicked Bunny", who is the only person that the board of mewetree.blogspot.com has ever worked with in preparing a blog, the machinations around a guilty plea are very interesting.
First of all, and as noted, did Mangione just plead not guilty as part of a martyr complex, explaining that he is proud of what he has done, and urging others to repeat his actions? (Thanks Wicked Bunny for catching my typo here.)
Recall that Kaczynski did not plead guilty by reason of insanity because he didn't want to be considered to be mentally ill. That man was "all in" on his cause! He understood that a judicial finding of mental illness would reflect very badly on the thesis that he put forward about losing our freedom to technology.
Is Mangione thinking the same way?
What of the opposite?
If he changes his plea to not guilty by reason of insanity, would the prosecution really want that plea to be rejected, and for him to be found guilty, or would they prefer that he be found to have been insane when he killed Thomson?
Consider this - if he is found to be insane, that could temper much of the growing pro-Mangione hysteria that has greeted his arrest, including the possibility of copycat murderers, and calls for social change. Mr. Thomson was part of an industry that literally owns much of the American political process, after all. Further assassinations of healthcare and other powerful CEOs would be bad for business.
In conclusion, Mangione may have a traditional insanity defence - at least the case could be argued. But if he invokes a traditional insanity defence, he may have sympathetic allies in both the jury and amongst the prosecutors who would want to see him found to have been insane at the time of the act, but for entirely opposite reasons; the first to praise him, the second to bury his cause and everything he espouses.
The New Insanity: What if Kaczynski and Mangione merge across time and space through a brand new defence of insanity; one that stems, not from the mental state of the person charged with an offence, but from the normal mental state of all of us in an age of high technology and the negation of the traditional self?
WTF??
Could a criminal defence of insanity be constructed based on the innovation we know as the internet and social media, and on how it likely changed not only Mangione, but many of the rest of us as well?
Let's go back a bit.
In 1991, a social psychologist named Kenneth Gergen coined the phrase "multiphrenia". This phrase stems from a phenomena related to our interactions with advanced technology where individuals could become essentially a fragmented version of themselves, by being pulled in so many directions that the essential individual could be lost. He coined the expression, "I am linked, therefore I am." well before the advent of social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, Tik Tok, Sims, AI, internet dating and cybersex, and social media, and email and texts.
Extrapolating his thesis to today, could many of us be suffering from what may be termed "Avaphrenia", and could this be used to explain Mangione's actions? I will again thank Wicked Bunny for exploring this concept with the board of mewetree.blogspot.com and for suggesting this new term. The "Ava" is from the word avatar, and the "phrenia" is the ending of the word schizophrenia.
Avaphrenia could be defined as, "The negation of one self through the adoption of multiple distinct micro-personalities occasioned by the use of social media and other internet-based platforms which require the user to play a different role, or to adopt a different "avatar" for each platform, with these interactions happening multiple, even tens or hundreds of times every single day. The result is a new fragmented version of the previous one self, where each fragment has a different moral base, adopted to suit the required social media or internet-based interaction."
Of course we all have a personality in the real world that is bound by well-understood social and other moral norms. But what would happen if our internet-based mirco-personalities started to bleed into this real world, taking their altered sense of morality with them?
Given avaphrenia, and given the high tech evolution from which is came, is it possible that an individual fragment of Mr. Mangione's divided self committed the crime, were his personality in the real world, and his other micro-personalities versions may not have done so?
Put another way, can he claim that he is effectively schizophrenic, not by way of mental illness, but by way of the multiple personalities that he plays each and every day as a product of being a normal consumer of information technology?
To be clear - all users of the internet have multiple personalities. Some are advertent, such as when a person plays someone else in a SIM, or cruises for sex on Tinder, or plays a video game. Others are inadvertent, such as when we lie to bots and online help people about various aspects of our personal and financial lives. There is no question that Mangione, like most of the rest of us, has micro-personalities when he is using the internet.
Do you see the delicious irony here. Mangione is an admirer of Kaczynski. Is it possible that his defence is based in the very world that Kaczynski both predicted and abhorred?
What would an Avephrenia-based defence of insanity actually look like?
The Defence: Mangione would first have to change his plea to not guilty by reason if insanity, where the insanity would be based on the idea that a micro-personality of Mangione, not Mangione himself, killed Thomas.
The defence would note that the micro-personality was enraged at what he had experienced at the hands of the health care system, and it sought to target someone in that system to take revenge - the intent formed on the internet, not in the real world.
In that sense then, the micro-personality of Mangione was playing a role that extended into the real world from the internet, but it also brought with it the essential morality and norms of Mangione's internet-based micro-personality. This one of Mangione's internet-based mirco-personalities simply did not think killing Thomas was wrong, and he even thought he had a right to do it. Beyond that, he believed that doing it would bring Mangione accolades - which turned out to be true.
In clinical terms, a medical professional would have to testify that the essence of his state of avaphrenia was a disassociation from other real persons, and an inability to understand that they are not objects of social media distain, but they are actual humans. So, acting in a state of avaphrenia, his defence would argue that Mangione committed a murder which he planned and executed almost as if he were going to the grocery store. He was so nonchalant that he went to Starbucks before the killing. He even cleared the jam in his firearm as if he was playing a video game. In essence, he was.
If this is accurate, then who is this guy and what may he mean for the rest of us?
From a sociological perspective, Mangione becomes anyone who has left reality and traditional morality in favour of potentially immoral internet fantasy and the narcissism that comes from their inevitable technological isolation. His insanity is their insanity. It may be found that he did not understand that what he did was wrong - recall, he shot someone down in the street in cold blood.
Implications: If this defence were to succeed, it would be immediately followed by legislation outlawing this it literally everywhere.
Why?
Because hundreds of millions of people likely suffer from avaphrenia. If this can excuse criminal conduct, that could open the flood gates to potentially limitless crime of all sorts where the defendant could simply argue that one of their micro-personalities did it, and they could walk away free.
That won't be allowed to happen. But maybe it could happen just one time.
