Luigi Mangione & the Dangers of Terrorism Charges

The indictment of the alleged assassin comes as some states expand terror laws to ensnare protesters who block “critical infrastructure,” Schuyler Mitchell reports. 

By Schuyler Mitchell
Truthout

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg unveiled new charges on Dec. 17 against Luigi Mangione, the 26-year-old suspected of killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.

While Mangione already faced second-degree murder and weapons charges, the unsealed indictment reveals an escalation: New York prosecutors have charged Mangione with first-degree murder “in furtherance of terrorism.”

Bragg’s choice to invoke the big “T” word came as a surprise; it’s not often associated with a single, targeted killing. In fact, prosecutors are charging Mangione using a state law hatched after the 9/11 attacks “to combat the evils of terrorism.”

Tacking terrorism onto the indictment allows the district attorney to upgrade the murder charges from the second to the first degree; under New York law, first-degree murder charges are normally reserved for crimes like serial or mass killings or the murder of police officers.

In previous cases, Manhattan prosecutors have used the state domestic terror law to convict people accused of plotting to bomb synagogues or recruiting support for ISIS.

In 2019, a white supremacist pled guilty to New York terrorism charges after he killed a Black man with a sword with the intent of starting a “worldwide race war.”

Bragg said he levied the charge against Mangione because his alleged killing of the UnitedHealthcare CEO was intended “to sow terror.”

Folk Hero Status

It’s hard not to see the bloated charges in the context of Mangione’s recent ascent to quasi-folk hero status.

At the scene of Thompson’s murder, police reportedly found shell casings with the words “deny,” “defend” and “depose” — an apparent reference to a book about why health insurance companies deny claims. The suspect was also said to have left a backpack full of Monopoly money in Central Park.

This assemblage of facts meant that broad swaths of the internet across the political spectrum erupted in praise for Mangione, who many saw as a crusader against the for-profit health care system. People shared harrowing stories about their own struggles to obtain coverage for life-saving care.

As the public face of the largest health insurance company in the U.S., Thompson was flattened to a symbol of corporate greed. His total compensation in 2023 exceeded $10 million.

This outpouring of public resentment has unnerved health care executives. Corporations scrambled to scrub information about their C-suites from the internet and called up private security details. Bragg made a broad reference to this fear in a press conference.

“This was a killing that was intended to evoke terror and we’ve seen that reaction,” he told reporters on Dec. 17. “This was not an ordinary killing.”

The word terrorist has never been a neutral descriptor in the U.S., applied equally across populations. In the aftermath of 9/11 and the U.S. invasion of Iraq, terrorism was recast by U.S. politicians and media as predominantly an issue of transnational, Islamist fundamentalism.

This imbued the term with a political charge that often obfuscated sources of mass violence at home — like white supremacy.

‘Legitimate’ State Violence

Labor journalist Hamilton Nolan has critiqued the terrorist label on his Substack, writing that, for years, it has been “embedded into the average American’s psyche as a synonym for ‘evil.’”

“It defines its subject from the outset as a villain,” Nolan wrote. “It connotes violence that is illegitimate, in contrast to the legitimate violence delivered by the state.”

Legitimate violence delivered by the state could, for instance, include systematic torture at Guantánamo Bay, the bankrolling of Israel’s genocide in Gaza or allowing a profit-driven health care system to kill thousands of U.S. citizens each year.

I should emphasize here that I’m not, of course, condoning any form of violence, but rather thinking critically through the instances in which state actors do or do not choose to call upon the terrorist label.

And in recent years, there have been several high-profile cases in which we’ve seen the police state’s definition of domestic terrorism expanding, even when no physical harm is involved.

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In Georgia, more than 40 activists have been charged under the state’s domestic terrorism law for their alleged involvement in the decentralized Defend the Atlanta Forest movement. Police warrants cited probable cause for the protesters’ arrest on grounds as weak as having muddy shoes.

Since late 2021, demonstrators have been pushing to stop the construction of a massive police training facility, dubbed Cop City, on Atlanta forest land.

[See: ‘Cop City’ Leads US Buildup in Police-Training Bases]

“If I am arrested with domestic terrorism charges for camping in a forest, that’s something I’m willing to go to court for,” Sam Law, an anthropology doctoral student from Texas, told the Associated Press in March of last year.

Georgia broadened its domestic terrorism statute in 2017, two years after white supremacist Dylann Roof perpetrated a mass shooting at a Black church in South Carolina. Lawmakers framed the revised law as a response to white supremacist violence, but the new language also included attacks on critical infrastructure and government facilities under the domestic terror umbrella.

The expanded definition has since been used to charge the Cop City protesters. According to prosecutors, blocking the construction of a police training facility now amounts to terrorism.

Several other states have proposed or enacted laws expanding their domestic terrorism definitions. When Democratic lawmakers introduced a bill in Oregon last year, civil liberties groups sounded the alarm.

Democrats said the expanded statute was a response to recent attacks on the power grid linked to neo-Nazi groups, but legal experts noted that the law was broad enough to sweep up anti-racist and climate activists for peaceful protests.

In February, New York Democrats introduced their own bill that would criminalize blocking public roads and bridges as an act of domestic terror — a further expansion of the already broad domestic terror law under which Mangione is being charged.

The move appeared to be in direct response to the influx of protesters swarming New York streets to call for a ceasefire in Gaza.

Disparate Acts

A brazen assassination, a mass shooting and a peaceful protest are obviously wholly disparate acts — and so their conflation under the banner of terrorism, a charge that already has a tradition of being wielded politically, should raise additional red flags.

On the day of Mangione’s arrest, another 26-year-old in New York was acquitted. A jury found Daniel Penny not guilty of criminally negligent homicide in the case over the death of Jordan Neely, a Black unhoused man experiencing a mental health crisis on the city subway. Video captured Penny maintaining a chokehold on Neely for nearly a minute after he had gone limp.

The shocking and sudden nature of the killing sparked protests calling for justice for Neely, including one group of demonstrators that jumped on subway tracks on the Upper East Side. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) arrested and charged those protesters with domestic terrorism last May.

Bragg’s office later dropped the NYPD’s charges. But as local reporting pointed out, the activists faced the same domestic terrorism charges as Frank James, the shooter who opened fire on a New York subway in 2022, injuring 10 people — simply for jumping on subway tracks.

On Dec. 19 federal prosecutors unsealed their own indictment against Mangione, including federal charges of murder, stalking and weapons offenses. New York ruled capital punishment unconstitutional in 2004. But if Mangione is convicted in federal court, he could face the death penalty.

Schuyler Mitchell is a writer, editor and fact-checker from North Carolina, currently based in Brooklyn. Her work has appeared in The Intercept, The Baffler, Labor Notes, Los Angeles Magazine, and elsewhere. Find her on X: @schuy_ler

This article is from Truthout and republished under the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.

The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.

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