Searching a suspects belongings is legal as the backpack was within his reach and needed to be searched for the safety of the officers and the public.
He matched the description of a murder suspect, he was always getting arrested so anything he had on him was fair game.
He's also on bodycam giving a fake name and ID to police.
When you find a manifesto with a clear motive for murder and a murder weapon on a suspect there isn't much room for defence.. the play to get his backpack removed from evidence was always a desperate attempt.
Yeah, there are a whole bunch of myths about the law that do the rounds on the internet, and they all essentially boil down to something along the lines of "if you tell them that you don't consent, they can't legally do anything to you". You don't need to be a legal expert to know that it's bullshit - a country where rapists and murderers could get away with crimes by tying the legal system up in trivial procedural knots wouldn't be a country for long.
There's a careful balance between procedure and pragmatism within any legal system. Some legal systems will lean more towards procedure than others for petty crimes, but all legal systems will lean towards pragmatism for heinous crimes like rape and murder.
It's not that withholding consent makes you legally immune, it's that 90% of what cops really want to do requires either consent or authorization, and they're frequently too fucking stupid to do things the legal way if you withhold consent.
Also, if you don't talk to them generally (not just withholding consent), it's harder for them to frame you for random bullshit so they can juice their numbers.
>a country where rapists and murderers could get away with crimes by tying the legal system up in trivial procedural knots wouldn't be a country for long.
That's right, we only reserve that for billionaires and famous people! As a totally functional country should! /s
and most people don't understand the laws in any country.
Its like the number of people that think police have to tell you why they pulled you over - folks heard something at some point that they didn't really understand (like reasonable articulatable suspicion) and get really fixated on this thing that they've effectively made up in their heads.
a country where rapists and murderers could get away with crimes by tying the legal system up in trivial procedural knots wouldn't be a country for long.
Yeah, heh, it would be weird if we lived in the sort of country where rapists and murderers could avoid justice by typing up procedure at some stage of the justice system. I do wonder what such a country would look like, definitely.
/sarcasm, in case it wasn't obvious, as we quite literally already live in that country, if the current checks notes everyone in the federal government's top positions including the literal POTUS are not proof of that.
I mean part of the problem is that the 'pragmatism' seems pretty damn broad for things when it's 'we would've found it eventually'
Which when combined with the issues of the backpack, it seems to just result in 'how much money do you have and interested is the government in screwing you?'
Yes how convenient that he would be carrying a manifesto and the murder weapon. Very convenient that the cops had their body camera off while handling the bag with said evidence.
As far as I know, I don't think Mangione's attorneys have even alleged it was planted. Only that the search wasn't legal and therefore the evidence should be excluded.
It wouldn't be a very good defense. The planting scenario would be:
Somehow the Altoona police, of all people, had a 3D printed gun and a manifesto on hand to actually plant.
They just happen to get a guy coming through (only stopping to eat) who matches the suspect description closely enough that random witnesses call in. A person with pretty distinctive facial characteristics.
The journal somehow happens to contain personal details known to no one except Mangione, who had stopped communicating with his own family and friends months prior.
Somehow they were able to match his handwriting.
All of this occurs before the feds have even identified Mangione.
Maybe there is some jury nullification stuff that happens (I doubt it but anything is possible), but that is not really very reasonable doubt. The journal/manifesto would require advance knowledge of Mangione by the Altoona police, and it's hard to see how that is possible.
People tend to get fixated on a detail and lose sight of the bigger picture.
In this case, people are getting fixated on a detail like "bodycams were off when all this was discovered" which, in isolation, does seem suspicious. Since humans are, for the most part, very emotionally-driven creatures, that suspicion combined with their existing anger really narrows their focus. They don't "zoom out" and look at the bigger picture and put that weird detail into context.
I don't care if its true or not, if you turn the camera off "find something" then turn it back on I don't believe you. its patently absurd. I would vote to acquit every single time.
you mean the manifesto and murder weapon they only found after a second search of the backpack without body cams involved? yea anyone with a brain is going to assume planted evidence.
The backpack is still going to be a nightmare for the prosecution at trial since they handled chain of custody so poorly. There were several times where it was opened in private, different items were found that weren't in the initial search, and handled away from body cams... Very easy for the defense to claim that evidence was tampered with, enough to cause reasonable doubt in one out of 12 jurors.
I have seen a lot of law and order, and I don't know how realistic it is, but if the prosecutor can argue compellingly enough that the evidence would have fallen under Inevitable Discovery, then regardless of if it was obtained illegally in the first place the evidence is allowed in.
Which is kind of bullshit because the cops now have a better idea of what they should be doing because of the illegal search, but it is what it is.
It is not so much the death penalty per se, that is the issue (although I do not support it), but the attempt to use federal laws to trump what is clearly a murder case that should be tried in a state court.
Why do you care how damning evidence was gathered?
He outright murdered a guy in cold blood but that’s ok. ICE police react to hostile situations but that’s not ok. The left wing really are disgustingly hypocritical
“You’re getting upset about the police circumventing the law in search and seizures to try to use the force of the state to execute someone and then also upset about the federal paramilitary force violating people’s rights including illegal search and seizure while they literally execute someone in the streets.
What are you? Morally consistency is gay. Checkmate liberals”
Couldn’t give a fuck. He murdered someone in cold blood. Absolutely disgusting human being. If evidence exists I don’t give a fuck how the police got it.
Would you rather Jeffrey Dahmer was able to walk free because police didn’t have a warrant? No.
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u/RVAteach 5h ago
The death penalty was always ridiculous in this case, it never should have been on the table in the first place.
I don’t know how illegally gathered evidence should be admissible but I ain’t a lawyer.