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Luigi Mangione illegally searched during arrest in health insurance CEO killing, lawyer says
(www.reuters.com)
this post was submitted on 22 Feb 2025
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Fruit of the poison tree, if they can prove it.
What does this mean?
If the search was, in fact, improperly conducted, it then would be an illegal search and seizure. At that point all evidence obtained by the search is inadmissible in court. They may have just torpedoed their case just with the search alone.
The documentary is a whole other legal can of worms that I am in no way qualified to even begin to analyze.
The US has a legal concept called fruit of the poisoned tree. Basically, if evidence was obtained by cops illegally, it can’t be used against a defendant. Essentially, the prosecution can’t use fruit that they found from a poisoned tree, because the fruit is considered tainted. For instance, let’s say cops illegally search you, and find weed. If your defense lawyer can prove that the search was illegal, the evidence (your weed) gets excluded from the trial.
There are a few exceptions, like cops being able to use evidence from someone who stole it. For instance, if someone steals a laptop and then finds CSAM on it, the laptop can still be used against the person it was stolen from. Because the initial theft was illegal, but the cops weren’t the ones who stole it; They legally obtained it from the thief who reported the CSAM and turned the laptop over. But as a general rule, if cops break the law to get evidence, the evidence is thrown out.
So if they prove that Luigi was illegally searched, it potentially excludes all of the evidence they found on him, like his written manifesto and the ghost gun in his backpack.
But this trial is already a fucking sham, so I have no doubt that the courts will turn case law on its head to rule the search was legal, even if it was blatantly illegal. Cops have a lot of leeway in how they can justify a search, so the detectives can likely just say “we thought we smelled weed, so we initiated a search” to get the search ruled as legal.
I wish I could disagree with this analysis of the current state of our punishment system.
The others have already answered, but I'll leave you with this nice summary, and a link to the best source of law info for the commonfolk in america there is.