Schrödinger's Search
The search of Luigi Mangione's backpack was ruled partially illegal - in the same way the Titanic partially hit an iceberg.
Here’s a riddle for you: You’re trying to leave an Altoona McDonald’s but blocking the door are two cops. One can only tell the truth while the other can only tell lies. You don’t know which cop is which, because they are both pasty and balding. What single statement can you make, and to whom, to leave with your constitutional rights intact?
Answer: None. You’re powerless. The question is built on a false premise. That is, an incorrect assumption that forms the basis of an otherwise logical argument. Maybe some details of the argument hold value - maybe you work out a question that outsmarts both cops (not hard), choose the opposite set of slow sliding doors than the one they indicate, decide on a McFlurry for the road - but none of it matters. At the end of the day the cops will arrest you because of your voluptuous eyebrows and medical mask, and that’s just that. They were never letting you go.
Another riddle, another false premise: How can a search be both legal and illegal? Turns out that depends entirely on what you find and how useful it is to the prosecution’s argument. Or at least, that’s the impression we got when New York Supreme Court Justice Carro handed down his decision following suppression hearings in Luigi Mangione’s state case.
What’s in a name?
Rewind. Before we get to the search itself, let’s take a moment to ponder the question beneath the question: why was Luigi being held in the first place?
While his colleagues conducted the search that Justice Carro would later declare partially illegal - in the same way the Hindenburg was partially on fire - Lieutenant Hanelly of the Altoona Police Department stepped outside the McDonald’s to call Blair County First Assistant District Attorney Nichole Smith.
His mission: work out what charges they could actually hold their suspect on. And so Smith stepped out, consulted with District Attorney Peter Weeks, and delivered the answer. Luigi had presented a New Jersey driver’s license that wasn’t his and initially given a false name. Sorted: tampering with records or identification, and forgery.
Only, not quite. Because when officers informed Luigi that he would be placed under investigation if he did not identify himself, he told them his real name. This is the false premise beneath the false premise. Not simply the question of whether the search was legal, but whether the basis for that search, that arrest, that year and a half spent in federal jail, ever existed at all.
It is interesting, we think, that the suppression decision wipes all statements highlighting this major anomaly from the record just in time for trial.
Justice does the Hokey Pokey
On May 18, following a surprise announcement that the suppression outcome hearing would be video recorded, Mangione appeared in court again to hear Justice Carro’s decision. Dressed in a suit and shackled at his wrists and ankles - prejudicial pre-trial publicity be gone to the wind - Luigi bore a calm and contemplative figure as he listened to the proceedings. Unfortunately, he could not take part in them personally, on account of being physically prevented from taking notes or joining his lawyers at the bench.
The defense’s motion to suppress evidence was both granted in part and denied in part, meaning some evidence the prosecution were hoping to use at trial will not be allowed. This is a partial win for Luigi; some evidence found in a search at McDonald’s in Altoona, PA, including a phone, magazine, computer chip, passport, and wallet isn’t admissible. Some statements have also been suppressed.
Despite the prosecution’s witnesses claiming in December that the bag search was due to exigent circumstances - their concerns about potential presence of a bomb within the backpack - Justice Carro wrote “this court is unpersuaded that the People have met their burden of showing exigent circumstances.”
Well, yeah. We could have saved you five months on that one.
None of the behaviour exhibited by officers at McDonald’s suggested they were concerned about the presence of a bomb and none of the circumstances surrounding the events of the morning of the shooting suggested a wider threat of violence.
Why, then, did the ruling allow one exception in his ruling on the McDonald’s search? A notebook recovered in the exact same search by the exact same officers.
If a notebook hits a McDonald’s table during an illegal search, does it make a sound?
The decision relied in part on the case of People V Lewis (2021) which, on appeal, concluded that when the arresting officer removed a small envelope from the defendant’s pocket during a search incident to arrest and “peeked inside”, it constituted a search of a closed container. In the absence of exigent circumstances, the officer should not have opened the envelope.
This small item of case law gave Justice Carro the distinction to allow the notebook into evidence because he concluded a notebook is a closed container and it was not ‘opened’ until a later inventory search at the station.
It’s not exactly sealed shut though, is it?
As such, the search at McDonald’s has been deemed both illegal and legal. An unlawfully searched bag yields an inadmissible phone, an inadmissible computer chip, an inadmissible passport and wallet… And one perfectly admissible notebook, because the cops were polite enough not to read it on the premises. The constitutional protection against unreasonable search and seizure, it turns out, has a courtesy clause.
The content on the phone was not accessed during the initial bag search. The content on the computer chip was not accessed at McDonald’s, and yet those were ruled inadmissible. So why is the notebook different?
Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies
We could go as far as to say the whole backpack could be considered a closed container, which is supported by People V Gokey (1983). That case established that a closed bag is treated as a single unit and cannot be searched unless exigent circumstances exist; its individual items are irrelevant as the constitutional violation has already happened. Within this context, it would’ve been well within the law to suppress the whole bag - effectively, throwing out the case.
You see the problem.
Justice Carro agreed with the defense that exigent circumstances did not exist. This is the Schrödinger’s Cat of the case: a search that is both legal and illegal until the contents are observed. Only then can the courts decide whether they need it to secure a conviction or not.
What has eyes but cannot see?
The judge’s decision to record the hearing and make it available to the public afterwards came as a surprise. Luigi appeared shackled at his wrists and ankles, and struggled to make notes on the paper in front of him. Surrounded by court security and his own legal team - and having been allowed shackle-free at the suppression hearings - he hardly constituted a threat.
None of Luigi’s hearings, bar his arraignment in December 2024, have been videoed; only a few press photographers have been allowed to take and disseminate pictures to the media at the beginning of some hearings. So what was the rationale behind this specific one being on tape? To get the reasoning behind a controversial ruling as on-record as possible in anticipation of appeals, perhaps?
What we can say with confidence is this: the decision as handed down contains an enormous logical inconsistency. Either the search at McDonald’s was illegal, in which case everything found in it is tainted fruit, or it wasn’t. This ruling has managed to conclude both simultaneously, and only the item that most damages Luigi’s defense has emerged unscathed. A remarkable coincidence.
Riddle me this
In the aftermath of the decision, headlines centered on a weapon, a notebook, the comments of press-credentialed fanatics hopped up on the defendant’s dreamy gaze. The status of certain items: namely, a laptop and a false ID, remains uncertain as onlookers and legal commentators alike pick apart the ruling’s implications and come to different conclusions each. The entire thing feels… incredibly uncertain.
But while we’re quibbling over details and spectacle, that age old media-public call and response, we’ll miss the false premises it all stands on in the first place. The search deemed illegal except for one item. The false identity charges built on a lie. Each premise a trapdoor, each trapdoor opening onto another. Only, without all of that - what’s left?
We’ll answer that question with one final riddle:
Q: What gets bigger the more you take away?
A: A hole.