Moments after Luigi Mangione was handcuffed at a Pennsylvania McDonald’s, a police officer searching his backpack found a loaded gun magazine wrapped in a pair of underwear.
The discovery, recounted in court Monday as Mangione fights to keep evidence out of his New York murder case, convinced police in Altoona, Pennsylvania, that he was the man wanted in the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in Manhattan five days earlier.
Unless they had probable cause to believe there was a bomb, that’s absolutely no excuse for a search. Might as well just get rid of the fourth amendment altogether if police can just imagine the possibility of a dangerous object and excuse searching anything at any time.
If she really thought there was a bomb, she is recklessly handling this herself instead of calling in a properly trained and equipped bomb squad. But far worse, she claims she needed to check it so as not bring a bomb to the station, but apparently has no problem potentially handling a bomb around a bunch of innocent bystanders.
That she is lying in order to justify what she knew to be an illegal search is actually the least damning interpretation. Either way though, the evidence should be thrown out along with her career.
Also, she apparently hadn’t even searched it well enough to notice a gun sitting in it…so not sure she’d have noticed a bomb in there anyway.
(Not that any of this isn’t a bullshit frame job, as that gun clearly got tossed in before her body camera got turned back on once back at the station)
Not only that but also somehow failed to find a full sized pistol and silencer while searching the bag for explosives, which is pretty alarming.
I replied at about the same time as you, with similar comment, but I wanted to add that she didn’t ‘find’ the gun and silencer until she took the bag on an 11 minute ride to the station in her car. How do you search a bag for a possible bomb and miss a handgun and silencer? That is an incompetent search or the gun wasn’t there during the initial search and was added later.
That’s the bullshit issue with probable cause. A “hunch” is proof enough and can range from good instincts to racism.
Not always. Well, maybe it depends on the jurisdiction. But, for example, stopping and searching cars has a lot more leeway than searching a house. Maybe searching people in public is the same? I remember New York has/had that stop and frisk law.
Of course I am not arguing against you, as I agree that it’s all bullshit and unconstitutional. This case especially. People have gotten off for much less technicalities, and yet Mangione is still on trial. He will never see a fair trial.
Different levels of search. A “weapons pat down” does not constitute a search requiring a warrant or probable cause. Even then a weapons pat down can only be initiated on a detained or arrested person. The former simply requires “reasonable and articulable suspicion” that crime is afoot. That’s a lower bar than probable cause but should be more than just a hunch.
And a tip is more than a hunch. I’m sure there was some illegal conduct during the arrest, but I don’t think this is it.
A tip is absolutely not “more than a hunch”. I can’t recall all the finer details about what elevates a tip from essentially “random gossip” to RAS or even PC, but it’s not as simple as cops receive a tip means they can search you.
Ah yes a hearsay hunch. Nobody positively ID’d anyone before submitting a tip. It’s still a hunch.
Well, if it was anybody other than st Luigi, we probably wouldn’t care as much about the technicalities. And there really are too many police officers to only hire ones that can handle all the technicalities. So the system gives them wiggle room, which is reasonable. There are lots of places where that wiggle room is clearly excessive. I am not sure if this really is one though. Hard to say for sure.