It is unlikely but not out of the question that Luigi Mangione, who is suspected of fatally shooting UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson last week, will face federal charges, and it is "fair to be concerned" that Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg will "mishandle this case," former prosecutors told Fox News Digital.
Mangione was arrested by police in Altoona, Pennsylvania, on Monday morning after a five-day manhunt when a McDonald's patron recognized his face from wanted posters.
On Tuesday, Mangione refused to waive his right to an extradition hearing in a Pennsylvania court, and his attorney said he intends to file a writ of habeas corpus challenging Mangione's arrest. Bragg and Blair County District Attorney Peter Weeks are working to get the 26-year-old Ivy League graduate to New York.
"There is no obvious hook for a federal murder prosecution," James Trusty, who served as a prosecutor in Maryland for 27 years, told Fox News Digital, based on the publicly available details of the case.
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However, Trusty said, evidence for potential federal charges could be found on Mangione's laptop that was seized upon his arrest.
Although federal authorities can hand down murder charges, Trusty said "the types of things that could make it go federal is if [the murder] was in conjunction with organized crime, drug trafficking or a hate crime, which has a more narrow definition than just ‘I hate insurance companies,’" Trusty said.
Members of the Altoona Police Department wrote in a criminal complaint obtained by Fox News Digital that they found a "black 3D-printed pistol and a black silencer." Possessing such a "ghost gun" – a home-cooked weapon that is unserialized and therefore untraceable – is a federal offense, former Joint Terrorism Task Force head and Port Authority Chief Security Officer John Ryan told Fox News Digital.
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But sentencing for such a charge would amount to a far shorter sentence than a murder charge at a state level, Trusty said, likely just a year behind bars.
"If there's something like a ghost gun that becomes a separate standalone federal case, you could do that as a matter of a ‘safety net’ to say, 'We're going to get something out of this [prosecution]," Trusty said.
Fox News contributor Andrew McCarthy wrote in a Monday National Review article that he has misgivings about Bragg prosecuting Mangione's case.
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"Can Alvin Bragg – the paragon progressive prosecutor who seems to regard the streets of New York as if they popped out of Howard Zinn’s revisionist American history textbook – be trusted to prosecute a radical leftist for carrying out a ‘direct action’ against a capitalist oppressor?" McCarthy wrote.
McCarthy, also a former prosecutor, wrote that it would "not surprise [him] if President-elect Donald Trump's Justice Department nominees and the State Department "[take] a hard look at the Travel Act, an old standby in organized-crime prosections" to take the case out of Bragg's hands.
A conviction for a federal charge also carries the possibility of a death sentence; capital punishment in New York was outlawed in 2004.
But Trusty said this outcome was "highly unlikely." Even if Mangione didn't act alone, there would need to be some evidence that he was "part of an entity that commits crimes" for the Travel Act to apply.
"Think the Mafia, MS-13, Tren de Aragua," Trusty said. "Even someone that helped him in an active conspiratorial role does not create a federal hook."
Mangione could have been charged with murder by federal authorities if Thompson had been murdered on federal property, Trusty said, but that is not the case.
Trusty said it is "fair" for McCarthy to have misgivings about Bragg's potential handling of Mangione's case.
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"I think Bragg has shown a proclivity towards political-minded prosecution decisions," he said. "Charging Daniel Penny 11 days after the event was immediately a bad sign that he was listening to political voices and not doing a thorough investigation to determine what the facts are and what is a just result."
"To add to that, his unprincipled prosecution of President Trump after he and the [State Department walked away from a Michael Cohen-led case] is another bad sign," he said. "It is fair to be concerned that he will mishandle this case, perhaps by allowing politics to be injected into the decision-making process instead of being a professional prosecutor."
