NEW YORK – On Friday morning, a man who spent months as both a fugitive and a cultural figure is expected to walk into a Manhattan federal courtroom and plead guilty to a federal stalking charge. The move may resolve one thread of a legal case that has gripped the United States since December 2024, or it may trigger a constitutional argument that could unravel a separate, more consequential prosecution before it ever reaches a jury.
Luigi Mangione, 28, of Towson, Maryland, is expected to appear before U.S. District Judge Margaret Garnett in the Southern District of New York and enter the plea, according to people familiar with the case, as first reported by The Daily Record and The New York Times and confirmed by multiple news organizations Thursday. The expected appearance is set for Friday morning in Manhattan, weeks before his state murder trial is scheduled to begin.
The federal case against Mangione has narrowed considerably since prosecutors first brought charges in April 2025. At that time, he faced federal counts of murder, weapons violations, and stalking, all arising from his alleged pursuit and killing of Brian Thompson, the 50-year-old chief executive of UnitedHealthcare, on December 4, 2024. Thompson was shot dead on a midtown Manhattan sidewalk outside a hotel where UnitedHealthcare was holding its annual investor conference. The killing played out on surveillance cameras and, within hours, became one of the most closely covered crimes the United States had seen in years.
Mangione was arrested five days later at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania, at the end of a manhunt that drew extraordinary public attention. Investigators found a 3D-printed firearm, false identification documents, and a handwritten document expressing grievances against the health insurance industry. That document did much to define the case’s public dimension. Online, Mangione attracted a following that cast him as a protest figure, an expression of rage against a health care system many Americans find inadequate and often punishing. That framing coexisted uneasily with the documented killing of Thompson, a husband and father of two children.
In January 2026, Judge Garnett dismissed the federal murder and weapons charges against Mangione, ruling that prosecutors had not overcome legal technicalities tied to federal jurisdiction over the killing. The ruling left the stalking count as the remaining federal charge, and it is to that charge that Mangione is now prepared to enter a guilty plea, according to people familiar with the case.
The consequences of the expected plea extend beyond whatever sentence Mangione will face on the federal conviction.
A guilty plea in federal court on a stalking charge gives his defense team standing to argue that prosecuting him at the state level for Thompson’s murder violates the Fifth Amendment’s prohibition on double jeopardy. If accepted by a court, that argument would require Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg to abandon the state murder case entirely. Prosecutors are expected to counter that the federal stalking charge and the state murder charge are legally distinct offenses arising from different statutes, and that the constitutional bar therefore does not apply. Both the defense and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York declined to comment when contacted Thursday.
The argument that parallel federal and state charges can coexist has been tested recently in other prominent cases. When a federal jury convicted Hadi Matar in July on terrorism counts for the 2022 stabbing of novelist Salman Rushdie, he was already serving a 25-year state sentence for attempted murder, and prosecutors successfully argued the charges were legally distinct offenses. Whether the same reasoning holds in Mangione’s case, where the federal charge is stalking and the state charge is murder for the same act, is a question the courts have not yet resolved.
The state indictment against Mangione initially included terrorism charges alongside murder, weapons possession, and forgery. A Manhattan judge dismissed the terrorism counts in September 2025, ruling they could not be sustained under New York law in these circumstances. The remaining charges are before Bragg’s office, which has been preparing the case for trial before Justice Gregory Carro. The scheduled September 8 trial date now hangs in uncertainty.
The specific terms of any agreement between federal prosecutors and Mangione’s legal team have not been disclosed. No public court filing confirmed a formal agreement as of Thursday afternoon. It is not known whether prosecutors agreed to sentencing recommendations, to a particular range of punishment, or to any arrangement coordinating the federal outcome with the state prosecution, all details that would bear directly on the double jeopardy question.
The case unfolds as American criminal courts are managing an unusual concentration of high-profile proceedings. This week, three states carried out simultaneous executions for the first time since 2010, drawing national attention to capital punishment at a moment when public support for it has reached a 50-year low. Mangione’s case, with its deep currents of public frustration and its unresolved constitutional questions, has occupied a different register in that broader reckoning with American justice.
None of that context appears in the text of a federal stalking statute. The charge Mangione is expected to plead guilty to covers the use of an interstate facility to pursue and surveil a person across state lines. Prosecutors applied it here because Thompson traveled from Minnesota to New York for the investor conference at which he was killed, providing the jurisdictional basis for a federal charge. The provision was designed for a different category of cases. Its application here produced charges that were always secondary to what New York state prosecutors considered the central offense.
What Friday’s expected plea will not settle is the question that has defined the case since the morning of December 4, 2024: whether the man accused of killing Brian Thompson will face a jury for that killing. That determination now moves into a constitutional proceeding that may prove more significant than either criminal trial before it.
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