News
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
view the rest of the comments
I don't think we'll have to wait that long. You know the guy in the footage of the shooting? The one without a monobrow? He's still out there.
And I really hope his name is Mario.
Yeah I agree, I'm not even convinced it is Luigi. The killer deliberately dressed in a way that hundreds of people in NY are dressed as at any given time. I'm skeptical of the trail they've pieced together from video camera footage. It's unlikely they have continuous shots of him going from one side of the city to the other.
And the thing is, I'm extremely skeptical of anything the NYPD says. They just recently had a case thrown out when they were caught on camera planting evidence. How many times do you have to plant evidence before you get caught on camera doing it?
I don't know if Luigi did it or not. But if he didn't do it, here's one plausible scenario for how he didn't do it that would still account for all the evidence we've seen publicly:
He's reportedly bisexual and from a wealthy and likely conservative family. And he hadn't talked to his family in months; they were actively looking for him. He got some severe back injury, and maybe he decides to just get away from unaccepting and overbearing family, perhaps for awhile, perhaps permanently. He wants to get away and find himself, just walk the Earth for awhile. So he's been living out of various hostels and homeless shelters for awhile in various cities. To keep his family from tracking him down, he gets a fake ID and travels under an assumed name. He wears a hoodie and mask almost everywhere, as he doesn't want his family to track him down. And he is genuinely worried about covid living in a hostel.
He's staying in NYC. A few days after the shooting, to his horror, he sees his own picture on the news listed as the killer. He freaks out and flees the city. He eventually gets picked up by the cops in Pennsylvania.
Unbeknownst to him, he was struck with the combination of terrible luck and a corrupt police department. Luigi happened to be dressed like the killer, and he happened to be near the scene of the crime within a few hours of the killing. A camera catches him placing a wrapper or bottle in a trash can. And his DNA is on it. The cops falsely conclude the killer is the one that put the wrapper in the trash, and they now are certain they have the DNA of the killer. (Another possibility is that the actual killer stood by a public trash can and waited until someone dressed like him happened to drop a wrapper in the trash, and then deliberately planted it near the scene.) They do some detective work, and find that Luigi has been living in an assumed name with a fake ID in a hostel.
So the cops are 90% certain they have the guy. They have a guy that vaguely looks like the killer, is using a fake ID, and whose DNA was found near the scene. In their minds, that's an airtight case, and they convince themselves that this makes it OK to fake further evidence to seal the deal. When they arrest Luigi, they plant the untraceable gun on him along with that manifesto, that was conveniently had written, and not published electronically like you would expect a software engineer to do.
And moreover, if the cops were going to just pick a convenient scapegoat, who better than Luigi? He's a young kid, estranged from his family, living in hostels and homeless shelters. He was basically living as a drifter. That's the exact kind of low social status person that cops would be tempted to foist something like this on.
I can't prove any of this obviously. But the one thing that sticks with me is Luigi's only public statement. He hasn't issued any public statement. But there was that one time, before he started working with his lawyer, where he shouted to the crowd of reporters. He didn't shout, "this was for the the innocent victims of Brian Thompson!" Or "I apologize for nothing!" Or some other statement that you would expect a proud martyr for a cause to make. Instead, he shouted, "this is an insult to the intelligence of the American people!"
That's the kind of thing an innocent man would shout. That's the kind of thing one would shout if you had just been framed by the NYPD. That is the cry of a young man who knows he is being framed and faces literal execution for a crime he didn't commit. I would be enraged too.
And again, this isn't outlandish, the NYPD has been caught faking evidence many times before. If they already had a decently strong case due to the DNA at the scene, I could absolutely see them trying to wrap it up quickly by planting the gun and manifesto on him.
People like to share these "Saint Luigi" memes. But if he actually is innocent, literally not the man who pulled the trigger? If he were to be still convicted, executed, and later the truth come to light? He would be a completely innocent martyr. That's the kind of thing that actually could get some one canonized as literal official Saint of the Catholic Church.
I of course can't prove any of this, and it is possible that Luigi really did do it. Cameras and lighting can make people look very different. Or maybe the cops have a lot stronger evidence that they just haven't released yet. But this is the kind of theory of the case I could see the defense making. And ultimately, they don't have to prove Luigi didn't do it. They just have to show reasonable doubt. And based on the entirely circumstantial evidence we have, combined with the NYPD's predilection for fabricating evidence, at least right now with the publicly available evidence, I think reasonable doubt absolutely exists.
How did they write a manifesto in his handwriting?
And if it's not in his handwriting, why bother to plant something that would actually hurt the prosecution? No cop wants to cause an "OJ glove" moment, where defense lawyers easily convince the jury that evidence was planted.
As long as they had a sample of his hand writing, which wouldn't be too hard to get, it would be easy enough to take. Discrepancies could be blamed on his back injury. Any police officer can pull up drivers license records, and those usually have a signature in them. You could extrapolate a handwriting style just from a signature. Or maybe it's just in block lettering so hand writing is less distinctive.
And again, we're dealing with a department that has literally been caught on camera planting evidence on people. They're not exactly the sharpest knives in the drawer.
No, a handwriting sample is not easy to get. It generally requires a search warrant, which means you can name the suspect before they are arrested, which didn't happen here.
A driver's license signature is not a handwriting sample, unless the manifesto consists only of Mangione signing his name over and over again all over the page. There are plenty of other letters, capitals, etc that they cannot reproduce.
Yes, cops are sometimes dumb enough to plant evidence. But they generally do this to the defenseless, not people from wealthy families who can hire someone like Johnny Cochrane.
Which is another major hole in this theory: if the NYPD were looking for someone to frame, why not frame someone who cannot afford to defend himself?
Why wait days for a phone call from an Altoona McDonald's, when there are plenty of people they could frame right then and there in NYC?
Why finally choose someone located 300 miles from NYC, considering that a randomly chosen person in that McDonald's was likely in central PA during the murder and thus would have an airtight alibi?
Why forge a handwritten manifesto when they could easily avoid suspicion by using a typewriter?
I mean, instead of spending days in Central Park, they could have spent 10 minutes searching the Fediverse for "guillotines" and "my medical debt" to find at least a dozen defenseless New Yorkers with a legit written history of advocating death to the wealthy and genuine animus against health insurance.
But no, instead they chose to frame some random guy. And because cops love extra work, they chose a random white, wealthy guy instead of a poor POC like they usually do. For an extra challenge, they even chose a young, attractive guy instead of someone less sympathetic like Ted Kaczynski.
Your theory requires the NYPD to spend a lot of effort making a lot of risky bets that could backfire and destroy their case, for no reason at all.
You can't see the killer's eyebrows in the shooting video. Or even his face.
It's possible there are eyewitnesses or unreleased video of the shooting. Otherwise the case against Mangione will likely depend on DNA and ballistics evidence. Either way, the photos in the coffee shop and hostel are irrelevant.