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.
Look up depraved heart murder.
It’s a real legal tool used by prosecutors all over the country. The idea is that if someone actively chooses to take actions so incredibly dangerous in pursuit of their own interests that it is likely to cause people to die, that indifference to human life can be treated as malice aforethought (intent to kill) and they can be charged with 2nd degree murder for any deaths resulting from thise actions. The classic example would be knowingly selling tainted food or medicine for profit.
And it’s not just a US law. China literally executed executives for signing off on the sale of tainted baby formula.
Brian Thompson intentionally ordered the increased rejection of pre-authorizations for covered procedures and medications in order to drive up profit, resulting in a great deal of injury and death.
Is random people shooting execs in the street my preferred choice for how society handles these issues? No. But when official justice is denied, the inevitable result is people deciding to act on it themselves.
Johnson is dead because he was shot, yes. But more than that, he’s dead because the justice system refuses to hold people like him accountable for their illegal actions.
You really need to know how it works before you argue it. I get that one of you looked this up one day- and the rest of lemmy all piled on thinking that it’s a one-and-done legal defense after only just reading about it, but…
Proof of INTENT TO KILL means he’d have to know without question that they would have died, and that they had NO OTHER MEANS to acquire the procedure. This is nearly impossible to prove and the entire defense could rest on this notion alone.
For the record, I’m not agreeing with this shit-
I’m simply pointing out why it’s not so fucking simple as it seems. Everyone here seems to think the easiest solution is the best solution without ever questioning why the easiest solution seems so easy, yet no one has tried it.
Hope this helps:
https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1337&context=dlj