A judge on Wednesday okayed an extensive wardrobe — including five pairs of socks — for Luigi Mangione to wear at an upcoming state court hearing in New York City.
The development offers a first glimpse at what’s next, not just sartorially but legally, for Mangione, accused of the assassination murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.
The public court schedule only says that Mangione is scheduled to be in court on Monday, December 1. The request for five pairs of socks signals that Mangione’s defense team could be bracing for a possible Monday-through-Friday hearing lasting the entirety of the first week of December — including December 4, the one-year anniversary of Thompson’s shooting on a Manhattan sidewalk.
It suggests the hearing could involve lengthy testimony by multiple witnesses extending into Friday, December 5.
The newly-approved clothing request also includes two suits, three shirts, three sweaters, three pairs of pants, and one pair of shoes without laces.
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The upcoming hearing concerns extensive evidentiary challenges involving Mangione’s arrest and is set to be the first time Mangione is in court for more than a brief, one-day appearance.
Mangione is fighting prosecutions in three jurisdictions. In Manhattan, he faces murder charges in federal and state court. In Blair County, Pennsylvania, he faces forgery and firearm-possession charges relating to his arrest there following a five-day manhunt.
He is in federal custody, and so the wardrobe request required approval from a federal judge, even though it concerned a state court appearance.
The success of Mangione’s wardrobe request also heralds at least a temporary detente in one of the stranger and more heated public disputes between the defense, led by Karen Friedman Agnifilo, and lead prosecutor Joel Seidemann.
Earlier this year, the two sides sparred in court filings over two heart-shaped notes that were nearly smuggled to Mangione inside a pair of argyle socks. The socks were part of the civilian clothes he’d been allowed to wear in lieu of his federal prison uniform for a February court appearance.
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The attempted smuggling was an abuse of the “special treatment” Mangione was receiving, Seidemann wrote to New York Supreme Court Justice Gregory Carro, the judge in the state-level case.
Even after the notes were intercepted, “The defendant was permitted to wear the argyle socks, which he first changed into and later changed out of because he felt that ‘they did not look good,’” the prosecutor added.
Photographs showing Mangione’s brown loafers and shackled, sockless ankles under the defense table were widely circulated.
In her response, Friedman Agnifilo suggested “most respectfully” to the judge that prosecutors should focus on Mangione’s “constitutional rights” instead of “whether or not he chose to wear socks.”
The February wardrobe malfunction cost Mangione his right to wear civilian clothes; he was back to wearing prison garb at his next state court hearing, in September.
This latest approval suggests Mangione’s sox scandal has subsided.
On Tuesday, Seidemann joined with Judge Carro in consenting to Mangione’s request to wear his specified wardrobe of civilian clothes at his December hearing — socks included. The request was approved on Wednesday by Mangione’s federal judge, US District Court Judge Margaret Garnett.
The December hearing will be comprised of at least two separate proceedings, as granted in September by Carro.
In the first, the defense will challenge and the prosecution will defend how police in Altoona, Pennsylvania, elicited statements from Mangione during his arrest in a local McDonald’s.
Mangione’s lawyers argue that he was not read his Miranda warnings until 17 minutes after they began asking about his identification, his possessions, and what he was doing in the fast food restaurant.
In the second proceeding, both sides will fight over the admissibility of the evidence seized by Altoona police.
According to prosecutors, Mangione’s possessions as he sat in the restaurant included a black backpack containing a 9 mm “ghost gun” with a metal barrel and a 3D printed trigger and pistol grip. Prosecutors say this was the weapon used to murder Thompson.
The 50-year-old father of two from Minnesota was repeatedly shot in the back from close range outside a Midtown Manhattan hotel where he’d been scheduled to address a UnitedHealthcare investor conference.
Mangione’s backpack also contained what Altoona police vouchered as a “manifesto,” a red spiral notebook with handwritten pages. In it, according to prosecutors, Mangione described his misspelled intent to “wack the CEO at the annual parasitic bean-counter convention.”
Carro approved a third, Mosley hearing, at which the judge may assess the reliability of witness identifications.