UnitedHealth CEO shot

SWJJ said

I can PROMISE you a good defense attorney will absolutely put the healthcare industry at the crux of the trail. They won't be named as a plaintiff or a defendant, but they will be a focal point of the defense. It's gonna be how you make the jury sympathetic to his cause.

Unless he takes a plea deal of some kind.

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I don't think that's how it will go down - trials are not wide-open shows to compete for the sympathy of the jury. There are legal elements of the charges and legal elements of the defenses and the trial will only involve evidence as to those elements. And there are pre-trial motions (called motions in-limine) where the judge will rule on what the scope of the evidence will be and what evidence can be introduced to the jury.

It's possible that the defense will be able to raise some aspect of his state of mind (perhaps in arguing murder 2 instead of murder 1) that may touch on his feelings about the healthcare industry but there's really no aspect of the murder case that relates to the healthcare industry. The victim didn't personally do anything to the suspect - so it's not a case where a history between the victim and the suspect is relevant to the suspect's motivation and acts as a mitigating factor. There may be openings here and there to get to it (most likely his own testimony if he takes the stand) but there's just no basis for it to be the focus of the defense. The state is going to seek to preclude that line of presentation to the jury and I think the judge will agree. Of course, it's also just there - the jurors will most likely know about it. If they want to apply some sort of Robin Hood mitigation, they will be able to.

But you know, people with mental illness get obsessive to the point of murder - Mark David Chapman grew so fixated on John Lennon and his comment that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus that he decided he had to kill Lennon for retribution. We don't really know the fully history on Luigi Mangione, but it's quite possible that he grew similarly obsessive about Thompson. Is the basis for the obsessive behavior that led to the murder of a human being that had no interaction with the killer really relevant? Should a jury consider whether John Lennon was a bad person because of what he said about Jesus - and that mitigated Chapman's culpability? It is different simply because more people can relate to the direct harm one can feel when dealing with the healthcare industry?