Marc Agnifilo, the lawyer who spearheaded Sean “Diddy” Combs’s largely successful defense this spring, stood a bit off to the side from his colleagues, including his wife, Karen, as he awaited another client’s entrance into a Manhattan courtroom. A mix of tabloid reporters and online personalities sat in the gallery, turning their heads over their shoulders toward the door.
Across the street, a throng of protesters had gathered to chant “due process is a legal right,” “free Luigi,” and “health care is a human right.”
“No cell phones, no outbursts,” a redheaded court officer, a stern but polite fixture from Donald Trump’s criminal trial in the same courthouse last spring, warned. “Court decorum as always.”
And then, just before 9:30 a.m., Luigi Mangione walked through the center of the room in a tan prison jumpsuit, betraying little emotion as keyboards clattered and the shackles around his ankles clanked.
Since Mangione, the 27-year old Ivy League graduate accused of murdering UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on a midtown Manhattan street, was arrested in December, he has become a symbol of anger over the American health care system. The r/FreeLuigi Reddit forum boasts roughly 40,000 members who dissect court filings and coordinate their support for Mangione. In the lead-up to Tuesday’s hearing in his Manhattan criminal case, one thread circulated a flyer from People Over Profit NYC, an advocacy group that describes itself as “rallying for health care reform and justice for Luigi Mangione,” pitting Mangione against New York mayor Eric Adams, New York Police Department commissioner Jessica Tisch, and the Trump administration’s attorney general, Pam Bondi. (Mangione has also been charged in a parallel federal case in which Bondi is seeking the death penalty; he has pleaded not guilty in both cases.) Near the courthouse, I passed a small truck with an LED sign on its side linking to People Over Profit NYC’s website and a QR code with an instruction to “scan to support Luigi’s defense.”
The temperature continued to rise last week with the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. A recent Fox News segment focused on the notion that there are “many similarities between Kirk assassin and Luigi Mangione.” (The suspect in Kirk’s murder, Tyler Robinson, is expected to be charged on Tuesday.) “Simply put, the defendant hoped to normalize the use of violence to achieve ideological or political objectives,” federal prosecutors previously argued in an August court filing. “Since the murder, certain quarters of the public—who openly identify as acolytes of the defendant—have increasingly begun to view violence as an acceptable, or even necessary, substitute for reasoned political disagreement.”
Tuesday’s hearing lasted just over 10 minutes, and Mangione was largely shielded from the audience by court officers. (Courtroom photography later showed him taking notes on a yellow legal pad.) But the upshot was a significant development: The judge in the case, Gregory Carro, a second-generation jurist appointed by Rudy Giuliani in 1998, dismissed two state terrorism charges against Mangione. Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg had argued that the shooting, in the media capital of the world, was “a frightening, well-planned, targeted murder that was intended to cause shock and attention and intimidation.”
“The People presented sufficient evidence that the defendant murdered Brian Thompson in a premeditated and calculated execution,” Carro wrote in his decision. “That does not mean, however, that the defendant did so with terroristic intent.” Mangione is due back in state court on December 1 and federal court on December 5.
As Mangione exited the courtroom, he raised his eyebrows a few times and whispered to himself. The Agnifilos smiled and nodded at the press and, as they walked away from the courthouse, were trailed by an avid portion of Mangione’s supporters.
“That got rid of half the crowd,” another court officer remarked on the sidewalk.
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