NEW YORK — Luigi Mangione smiled for the cameras as he returned to court Tuesday for hearings over his defense team’s claim that Pennsylvania police violated his constitutional rights during and after his arrest at an Altoona McDonald’s after the assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.
Altoona Police Officer George Featherstone took the stand first Tuesday. He testified that he works as an evidence custodian, and his job is to log new evidence and help oversee the secure evidence room.
Thompson, 50, was a father of two from Minnesota visiting New York City for a shareholder conference in midtown Manhattan when a gunman approached him from behind and shot him on a sidewalk outside the host hotel.
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Mangione’s lawyers are asking the judge to suppress evidence taken from his backpack after his arrest and statements he made during the McDonald’s incident and to jail guards in the days that followed.
While they raised Fourth and Fifth Amendment concerns, prosecutors have dismissed the claims, arguing that police acted lawfully and appropriately, that the warrantless search of his bag after his arrest was routine and legal and that the only relevant non-Mirandized statement he made was to allegedly give officers a fake name when he showed them a phony ID.
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Officers are allowed to ask someone’s name without reading a Miranda warning, legal experts say. And a search of his backpack would typically be legal without a search warrant after his arrest.
Featherstone testified that he could not think of an instance where someone was brought to the precinct and an item like a backpack wasn’t searched. When a bag or a person is searched, every area is searched.
The department would not release contraband back to someone, he added.
The defense, however, raised additional concerns about evidence collection during cross-examination. Multiple bags were handed over to the NYPD, the lead investigative agency on Thompson’s murder, without times written on them.
Mangione faces up to life in prison if convicted on a second-degree murder charge in New York. He also faces federal charges that carry the potential death penalty and lesser charges in Pennsylvania.
