From the courtroom gallery, it was difficult to determine where Luigi Mangione was looking.
Two screens were playing a video on loop—one from almost exactly a year ago, of a faceless assassin gunning down UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on a midtown Manhattan street. Rows of court officers, reporters, and Mangione supporters sat behind the accused murderer on Monday, watching him as he watched.
The judge overseeing Mangione’s state case in New York ordered this week’s hearing after Mangione’s lawyers sought to exclude some pieces of evidence: a nine-millimeter handgun and a notebook, which included what was described by prosecutors as a “manifesto” outlining his intent to “wack” a health insurance executive, recovered from his backpack when he was arrested, as well as several statements he made in the aftermath. (His attorneys argue that police violated his constitutional rights during his arrest and searched his belongings without appropriate permissions; they also argue that statements Mangione made to corrections officers after his arrest were coerced.)
On Monday, Mangione sat, mostly unreadable, in a gray sport coat and white tattersall shirt. His attorneys, who include the husband-and-wife team of Marc and Karen Agnifilo—fixtures of the high-profile defense law circuit—last month asked that a court order the Bureau of Prisons to accept their request that Mangione receive two suits, three sweaters, three shirts, three pairs of pants, and five pairs of socks in advance of hearings that could stretch out over multiple days. They also asked the judge in Mangione’s state case, which runs parallel to a federal set of charges that could result in the death penalty, to allow him to have his hands unshackled so that he could take notes. (Mangione has pleaded not guilty in both cases.)
From this relative distance, Mangione seemed, as he has over a handful of court appearances since his arrest last year, attentive, responsive, and occasionally twitchy. The pool photos that quickly circulated on social media offered a head-on view: the defendant, smiling with his lawyers, and ostensibly immersed in the proceedings. In the broader Mangione spectacle, the intrigue from onlookers has had less to do with the allegations—even his most ardent advocates rarely profess his innocence—and more to do with assembling these breadcrumbs of personality. From the jury box, the sketch artist Isabelle Brourman, a regular chronicler of Donald Trump’s life and trials, as well as New York immigration hearings, made new images of Mangione.
The testimony has amounted, thus far, to a granular reexamination of the turning point in Mangione’s journey—from being an Ivy League–educated member of a well-to-do Maryland family to sitting at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania, and reaching global notoriety.
