this post was submitted on 06 May 2025
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Luigi Mangione
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Let's say that Mangione committed the crime.
My understanding is that he gave cops a fake ID when they questioned him on reasonable suspicion (the basis of which was a tip from an employee). That is something that yes, he can be arrested for. And he can be personally searched after that arrest. But at that point, he can no longer get a gun out of his bag, and cops have control of it, so he can't destroy evidence/get a weapon from it; so searching the bag should be out at that time. So, my understanding, based on case law, is that they would have needed a warrant to search it at that time, as the contents of the bag aren't related to the reason he's been arrested. You aren't supposed to be able to use a pretextural arrest to search a person's car or belongings (e.g., arrest you for suspicion of drunk driving, then search your car to find evidence of burglaries).
In theory, without the warrant, the search and everything from the search should be out. Even if he committed the crime, and kept all the evidence conveniently in his backpack, it should be completely excluded from the case. I'm sure that the DA is going to argue that there's some exception that allows a warrantless search, but I can't say what that argument will be. If the evidence is allowed in, his defense attorney is going to have to object every single time that prosecutors refer to it, for any reason, in order to preserve the option to claim that evidence was improperly admitted in an appeal. (Which they should absolutely do, if it goes that far!)
Federal rules of evidence is pretty complicated stuff. But goddamn, does it look like someone fucked up bad on a really high profile case.
Pretty sure you're wrong, specifically in that a search incident to arrest doesn't have lines in the sand about which crime you're being arrested for.
Good point, they don't even need a crime to arrest you.
This is how people end up with their only charge being "resisting arrest".
Off topic but I really like your name
Search incident to arrest typically allows you to search the person of the suspect to ensure that the person doesn't have a weapon, or has evidence of a crime that they can destroy. Once you've separated a person from a closed bag, you don't have the immediate right to search the bag; US v. Chadwick, 433 U.S. 1 (1977). OTOH, once an arrestee is actually being booked, they can perform an inventory of the contents of a bag (Illinois v. LaFayette, 462 U.S. 640 (1983)), which would have turned up the gun, etc., and it would have turned them up under controlled circumstances. But that's not what happened here; he appears to have been arrested on a pretextual basis, and then his bag seized and searched without a warrant. However, it's going to be up to his attorneys to make this argument, and my guess is that the state will argue that he was definitely, 100% going to be booked--despite the lack of evidence at that point to support that--and thus it was inevitable that the gun would have been found. I think that's bullshit, but we'll see.