26-year-old Luigi Mangione has been arrested in relation to the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO, Brian Thompson. But lawyers say he is unlikely to be convicted since “He was really cool about it.”
Thompson was shot and killed outside of a New York hotel last week. The shooter left no clues other than the words “deny”, “defend”, and “depose” written on the shell casings and a backpack filled with Monopoly money which is god damn Joker-shit, I’m telling you.
Once Luigi Mangione was revealed to be a suspect, the internet went into meltdown because, plot twist, he’s really hot.
“Yeah, we’re pretty sure he’s not going to jail,” said Angus Eurgh, a prominent New York lawyer you might have seen on television. “He’s hot and hot people don’t go to prison, it’s the law. He was also really cool about this whole murder thing and, call me a bad lawyer all you want, but I just don’t think cool people should be punished.”
As part of the manhunt, the police sent divers to search the Central Park lake and I don’t know why no one told them he probably wasn’t down there. No, Mangione ended up in a Pennsylvania McDonald’s which is just constantly in the news at the moment for some reason. He was then dobbed in by a goddamn snitch, a goddamn piece of work and good citizen if ever I saw one, he’s the one that should be arrested, not the hot one, Jesus.
On Mangione’s person was a note explaining his motives (very cool) and a 3D-printed “ghost gun” (super cool). So it’s going to be a tough call in the trial going forward. Will the judge and jury behave as they should, weigh up all the evidence, and lay out a suitable punishment? Or will they be like, “Ya but he dreamy, tho,” and let him free, setting a dangerous president for future models to off anyone deemed publically bad?
We get shooters all the time and you’d think every one of them would be demonized evenly but the general public doesn’t believe that murder is necessarily the worst thing. Sometimes the public will justify a murder if the cause appears noble and if they’re not a little goblin freak. Self-defence, a just war, capital punishment, just really poetic, passionate revenge, all can make killing ok to people.
But who gets to decide when killing is ok? The history of civilization has been the struggle to answer that question and we have long since concluded that leaving the answer to public consensus leads to dangerous mob rule, emboldens vigilantes, and leaves no recourse to punish killers who do not have righteous motivation or kill by mistake. We’ve built a legal system, that though imperfect does a better job at parsing out right and wrong than ‘just vibes’. And crucially this system has mechanisms to self-correct and improve. Righteous killing does not.
The system is broken but part of its self-preservation mechanisms is in its complexity and ability to disperse responsibility so no one person can be held accountable. The system can’t be dismantled because no one needs to take responsibility. The converse of this is that killing one person, shocking and newsworthy though it may be, does nothing to fix the larger system. Perhaps it was revenge but revenge brings only short-term satisfaction, not real solutions. Perhaps it was purely to send a message and maybe this death will motivate changes. To deem its justification this would have to bring about some change but even if it does we can only damn these actions as that of a pariah lest we inadvertently sanctify future killings, even those with which we don’t agree.
“Brian Thompson was a father to two, he was a husband, and he was a friend to many,” said Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro at a news conference yesterday. “And yes he was the CEO of a health insurance company,” he added as if this balanced out the other good things he just said.
“In America, we do not kill people in cold blood to resolve policy differences or express a viewpoint,” Shapiro continued. “I have no tolerance nor should anyone for one man using an illegal ghost gun to murder someone because he thinks his opinion matters most in a civil society, we are all less safe when ideologues engage in vigilante justice. In some dark corners, [Twitter] this killer is being hailed as a hero. Hear me on this: he is no hero the real hero in this story is the person who allied 911 at McDonald’s this morning.”
Luigi’s Mansion is now trending on Twitter.
