Luigi Mangione, the Ivy League graduate and high school valedictorian who is accused of gunning down UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on a street in midtown Manhattan, could face two separate trials on murder charges, one in New York state court and one in federal court. The trial in state court could come first, federal prosecutors said on Thursday. 

The U.S attorney and Manhattan’s district attorney are both eager to prosecute the high profile case, and the dueling jurisdictions have left Mr. Mangione’s legal team confused.

“This is a highly unusual situation that we find ourselves in,” Mr. Mangione’s lead defense attorney, Karen Friedman Agnifilo, told magistrate Judge Katharine Parker in federal court at the Southern District for New York on Thursday. She said she had been surprised to find her client was being brought to federal court rather than state court.

On Tuesday, Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg had brought an 11 count indictment against Mr. Mangione, including murder in the first degree and murder in the second degree as a crime of terrorism. But these charges were not on Ms. Agnifilo’s defense table at the federal courthouse. Instead, her client faced a complaint with four federal counts, including stalking and murder through use of a firearm.  

“Is there one case, two cases, two investigations? Is there a joint investigation? Frankly, I’ve never seen anything like that and what’s happening here,” she said.  

Ms. Agnifilo, who had entered the courtroom on crutches, having torn her ACL, aided by her husband, the defense attorney Marc Agnifilo, who is currently representing Sean “Diddy” Combs and previously represented NXIVM cult leader, Keith Raniere. Ms. Agnifilo said she had expected to appear before a New York state judge, Gregory Carro, at a hearing at 2pm, at Manhattan criminal court on the 13th floor.  

“In over three decades of prosecution I have never seen anything like this,” she said, standing up, as is expected of the attorneys in federal court in a sign of respect and proper courtroom decorum, but supporting her weight with her hands on the table. 

At around midday on Thursday, the federal complaint against Mr. Mangione had been unsealed. About an hour later, around 1 pm, Mr. Mangione arrived at federal court – the Daniel Patrick Moynihan Courthouse in lower Manhattan – having been transported to New York from west-central Pennsylvania via plane and helicopter. 

Mr. Mangione’s case shocked the nation. The 26 year old tech enthusiast, who comes from an influential real estate family in Towson, Maryland, outside Baltimore, was his high school valedictorian before earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the University of Pennsylvania. But in the early hours of December 4, at approximately 6:45 am, he allegedly shot and killed Thompson on a sidewalk in Midtown Manhattan, in front of the New York Hilton, as the executive was leaving his hotel on his way to an investor conference.   

“Security camera video showed the Shooter… come from between two parked cars, walk up behind the Victim, and shoot the Victim in the leg and back outside of the Midtown Hotel’s entrance on West 54th Street,” the affidavit provided by FBI agent Gary Cobb, which is attached to the federal complaint, states. 

After a five-day-long manhunt, during which pictures of the alleged assassin were circulated on national media and flooded the internet, Mr. Mangione was finally arrested at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania, where a worker called the police, after a customer had recognized the young man, who had removed his face mask to eat. 

On Thursday morning, Mr. Mangione appeared at two hearings at Blair County courthouse in Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania, to face forgery and firearms charges in Pennsylvania, and then to waive his right to fight extradition to New York. Immediately after, the alleged killer was transported via plane to Long Island and then via helicopter to Manhattan’s Wall Street heliport, where he was met by New York’s Mayor Eric Adams and New York Police Department commissioner Jessica Tisch.

“We wanted to personally be here to show the symbolism of leading from the front,” said Mayor Adams, who himself is facing corruption charges in the same federal court.  

“It was almost Hannibal Lecter-esque,” a legal commentator, Jeremy Saland, told CNN on Thursday evening, recalling the fictional serial killer being brought to Memphis with a giant entourage of excited law enforcement officials. The outlet reported that Mr. Mangione was “surrounded by a swarm of gun-toting NYPD officers, in a slow, lengthy ‘perp walk’ from the helicopter into a black van, with cameras catching every step.” 

He was not driven, as expected, to Manhattan criminal court, but to the Southern district court for New York to face a separate set of charges. Mr. Bragg is alleging murder in the first degree and murder in the second degree as a crime of terrorism, while federal prosecutors accuse him of stalking and murder through use of a firearm.   

“The theory of the murder charge of the Manhattan DA case is terrorism and intimidating a group of people. This is stalking an individual,” she said, referring to the federal complaint. “I would like clarity.” She added. 

Mr. Mangione, who shouted and struggled with officers when he was first led into court in Pennsylvania last week, this time was calm and composed. He sat between his attorney and her husband, looking down onto the floor of the courtroom. Before he was led into the courtroom, a US marshal had checked and patted down his chair and the table. The alleged assassin was not dressed in the orange jailhouse jumpsuit he had worn on his plane ride and during his court appearances in Pennsylvania. Instead he wore khaki pants, a white button down shirt, and a navy zip pullover (he still wore orange prison shoes). His hair had been cut, his face was shaven and he looked more like a young, aspiring attorney than a ruthless killer.     

As Judge Parker went over his rights and the accusations, Mr. Mangione nodded. He replied with “yes” when she asked him if he understood what he was being charged with. Once in a while, he touched his head with his right hand, going through his thick black hair with his fingers. On two occasions, when he came into the courtroom, and then again, when he stood up at the end of the hearing, he turned his head to glance at the rows of reporters, public spectators and curious in-house staffers, filling the pews behind him. 

The case has triggered an outpouring of public support for the alleged killer, due to the deep unpopularity of health insurers such as United Healthcare. Protesters gathered outside the courthouse in Pennsylvania, wearing the green “Luigi hats” resembling the Super Mario character from the game series created by Nintendo in 1985. One of the protesters held up a sign that read, “Murder for Profit is Terrorism! Free Luigi.” Another sign called him a “hero.” In Manhattan, where protesters also waited outside the courthouse, signs read, “health is wealth” and “ask yourself, who are you really protecting???” 

“I think it’s really terrible that some people seem to admire him, like him,” President-elect Trump said at a news conference on December 17. “And I was happy to see that it wasn’t specific to this gentleman that was killed. It’s just an overall sickness, as opposed to a specific sickness. That was a terrible thing.”      

The complaint, which was not read in its entirety during the hearing, details more entries from a handwritten notebook Mr. Mangione carried with him, when he was arrested, offering further insight into the long-term planning of the alleged assassination.    

In an entry from August 15, according to the complaint, he “describes how ‘the details are finally coming together’ and ‘I’m glad – in a way – that I’ve procrastinated, bc [because] it allowed me to learn more about [acronym for Company-1].’ The Notebook entry also states that ‘the target is insurance’ because ‘it checks every box.’” 

The acting United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, Edward Kim, said in a news release that “Thompson was allegedly killed just because he held the position of chief executive officer of a health insurance company.”

The federal prosecutor, Mr. Kim, called Mr. Mangione’s alleged crime “a grossly misguided attempt to broadcast Mangione’s views across the country.” He added, “this wasn’t a debate, it was murder, and Mangione now faces federal charges.”

But Mr. Kim also said that the charges brought by the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office would be the first to go to trial. He “thanked the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, which has brought a separate prosecution against Mangione, which is currently expected to proceed to trial before the federal case.” He did not offer any explanations as to why there were going to be two murder trials. .

“It’s not uncommon, but it’s certainly not common,” a criminal defense attorney, who did not want to be named, told the Sun Thursday evening over the phone when asked, if it was, as Mr. Mangion’s attorney had said in court, “highly unusual” to have two murder trials for the same crime in two different courts. 

“Sometimes, and maybe in this case as well, it’s a matter of having access to punishment for different crimes. As an example, a drug case can be indicted in state court but then transferred to federal (court) because there are crimes at the federal level that don’t exist in the state,” the attorney said.         

John Gotti, the notorious mobster who was the boss of the Gambino crime family, comes to mind. In 1992, Gotti was tried and convicted in the United States district court in New York on 13 counts, including racketeering, murder, and tax evasion. Two years before, he was tried in state court and acquitted. New York attempted to try Gotti four times, but each case ended in a mistrial. He would die in federal prison. 

In a brief press conference on Thursday, Mr. Bragg told reporters that “speaking generally, we’ve had state prosecutions and federal prosecutions proceed as parallel matters, and we are in conversation with our law enforcement counterparts.”  Mr. Bragg also noted that the state charges carry a maximum penalty of life without parole. 

The federal charges, however, could lead to an even harsher punishment. The count of using a firearm to commit murder could lead to a potential death sentence, though federal prosecutors did not yet say if they would seek the death penalty for Mr. Mangione. If they do, it would have to be approved by the US attorney general, a process that could take more than a year. 

“The US attorney sends the application to the justice department with lots of documentation, a process that can take a year or more,” the defense attorney told the Sun. 

Two young men involved in sensational crimes who were federally charged and sentenced to death were Dylann Roof, a white man who carried out a massacre in a Black church in South Carolina, and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, convicted in the Boston Marathon bombing.  

The attorney general who could potentially be faced with deciding whether or not to seek the death penalty for Mr. Mangione is former Florida attorney general Pam Bondi, whom Trump has nominated to lead the Justice Department. Ms. Bondi has yet to be confirmed by the senate. In Florida, she pursued death penalty cases with zeal.       

Sources told the New York Post that the federal government sought to pursue their own case “in part because New York abolished the death penalty in 2004.” That year the highest court in New York, the Court of Appeals, ruled that the state’s death penalty law was unconstitutional. Three years later, the last death sentence was commuted to life in prison without parole. And in 2008, Governor David Paterson ordered all execution equipment to be removed from state facilities.

After Thursday’s hearing, Mr. Mangione was taken to the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, where he joins two other high-profile inmates: Mr. Combs and the fallen crypto king, Sam Bankman-Fried. 

Mr. Combs, represented by Ms. Angnifilo’s husband, is awaiting trial on charges of racketeering, sex trafficking, and transportation for purposes of prostitution, and has been unable to get out on bail despite his attorney’s many exertions. According to various media reports, Mr. Combs shares a cell with Bankman-Fried, who is appealing seven convictions for fraud and conspiracy, as the Sun reported. 

On Thursday, Ms. Agnifilo declined to request bail for Mr. Mangione, reserving her client’s rights to do so at a later date. Judge Parker scheduled the next court hearing for January 18.

It is not clear when Mr. Mangione will be indicted at Manhattan criminal court.