Man that list would look very differently if all those assassinations of Hitler and Stalin hadn’t failed.

Yes, I noticed that progressives are far more likely to be assassinated than tyrants in modern times. Funny that.

Basically, right now the prosecution hasn’t actually provided any evidence that he did it. What little evidence they HAVE provided has tainted chain of custody, and was hilariously late. The defense STILL doesn’t actually have all the documentation and shit they were legally supposed to have like two months ago.

And by late, I mean that instead of giving the defense their legally required discovery documentation, the prosecution and mayor were grandstanding on TV and filming a documentary about how he ‘totally did it.’ (which is prejudicing potential juries).

They’ve also spied on his private communications with his lawyer, they never read him his miranda rights, the chain of custody of his belongings was broken (and a gun was, at minimum, planted- the gun was not in the backpack during the illegal search on scene, but the gun suddenly appeared inside the backpack at the station after chain of custody was broken.)

They’ve also changed their story several times, especially about the backpack and where it was found and what was in it. Finally, the pictures they have of the supposed shooter A: don’t actually look like Luigi Mangione to me and B: only prove that someone was at a hostel a few miles away something like two weeks before the shooting which is… utterly useless as proof.

tl;dr: People think it’s a frameup because they’ve already all but admitted to planting a gun on him, and they’ve broken basically every judicial process involved in a fair trial. The defense doesn’t want to push some parts of their argument too soon, because they need to save that for other arguments in the proceedings, not things easily disproven or discarded by less important proof. They have to play this as super carefully and by the book as possible, and that means not just shotgunning your arguments.

This is going to be as much about having the better sounding argument as it will be having the exonerating proof because of how politicized this case has become.

EDIT: I should also note- part of why the defense team isn’t trotting out all this information about where he could have been or what he might have been doing is because it straight up isn’t that part of the trial yet. As I said with the documentaries and interviews, the prosecution is doing a lot of prejudicing the jury, which should be called out by the judge, but hasn’t been. It might be that they are concerned that if they try to fight back, however, they WILL have the judge go after them for the same thing. They might also be saving and documenting all the occurrences of the prosecution doing that, in order to deliver it all at once in a massive, too-large-to-ignore package.

This is wild speculation but maybe his legal team are keeping that as an ace in the hole? The trial hasn’t even started, so why would they give the prosecution so much time to prepare for their strategy by publicly grandstanding about it?

Is there anything beyond just speculation?

Opportunity to plant evidence.

The defense argues that the search of Mangione’s backpack further violated his rights, arguing that there were no circumstances that constituted police conducting a warrantless search of the backpack. In the motion, Mangione’s lawyers wrote that it was only once an officer conducting the search “she had made a potentially devastating mistake by thoroughly searching the backpack of a murder suspect in a significant New York press case without a warrant, she suddenly stated that she was searching through the backpack at McDonald’s to make sure there ‘wasn’t a bomb or anything in here’.” However, Mangione’s defense team notes that the bomb squad was never called and the McDonalds was not evacuated over concerns of a bomb, but that another officer did tell the officer conducting the search that they “probably need a search warrant for it.”

Defense attorneys claim that some of the body cam footage is missing including 20 seconds of when Mangione was being questioned by a police when an officer placed his hand over his body cam and the 11 minutes during which the backpack was transferred from the McDonalds to the Altoona Police Department Precinct. The motion goes on the state that once that officer’s body cam footage resumes, it shows her immediately re-opening and closing the backpack compartments she already searched and then opening the front compartment of the backpack “as if she was specifically looking for something. Instantly, she ‘found’ a handgun in the front compartment.”

Any statements from friends or family?

Yep. Not sure what you want from that

Any attempt to present an alibi where he was at the time of the killing?

Presumably that will be during the trial.

Any statement from his lawyers denying he did it?

Plea of not guilty.

Did you miss the innocent until proven guilty and the statement that there is little to no evidence he did it. The onus is on the state to prove guilt. Not on Luigi to prove innocence. So, if you think he did it, where is the proof? Like the state isn’t coming forward with much untainted evidence and like…they really aren’t like…refuting like…the broken evidence chain and you know…they’re leaning really heavy on the media to swing popular opinion and stuff…