Mangione Dropped Charges Lay Bare Absurd Gun Crime Approach

The decision to drop two firearms charges that could have led to the death penalty for Luigi Mangione if convicted in the killing of a UnitedHealth Group Inc. executive spotlights the absurdity of the analytical framework used to decide whether a defendant is subject to a harsher penalty for using a gun to commit certain offenses.

Even the district court recognized the nonsensical result as applied to Mangione, a person alleged to have stalked Brian Thompson with the specific intent to kill him and who allegedly used a gun to shoot and kill him.

On April 17, 2025, a federal grand jury returned a four-count indictment charging Mangione with two counts of stalking and two counts of using a gun in furtherance of the stalking offenses. On Jan. 30, 2026, Judge Margaret Garnett of the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, presiding over the federal prosecution of Mangione, dismissed the two firearms offenses because the stalking charges weren’t necessarily crimes of violence under 18 USC Section 924(c)(3).

Section 924 imposes harsher penalties for using a gun to commit certain offenses, including the generic catch-all, a crime of violence, which is defined as any offense that “has as an element the use, attempted use, or threatened use of physical force against the person or property of another.”

Under existing US Supreme Court precedent, to determine whether a crime has as an element the use, attempted use, or threatened use of physical force against the person or property of another, the district court must look to the elements of the offense itself and not the underlying conduct.

Depending on the statute involved, the court must apply either the “categorical” or “modified categorical” approach. The history of those two approaches is lengthy and complicated, and so is the way they should be applied. This article leaves that discussion aside to focus on the results of the approach as applied to the Mangione case.

Applying the Supreme Court’s modified categorical approach, the district court concluded that the alleged stalking offenses didn’t count as crimes of violence because those offenses, in the abstract, didn’t necessarily involve the intentional “use, attempted use, or threatened use of physical force against the person or property of another.”

The court posited some hypotheticals to support its conclusion, including the potential prosecution of someone who traveled across state lines to harass a former romantic partner and who unintentionally put her in reasonable fear for her life, ultimately engaging in a course of conduct that accidentally caused her to crash her car and die. One potential problem with this hypothetical is that the hypothetical facts involve issues yet to be resolved by the Supreme Court regarding the line between speech protected by the First Amendment and speech that can be criminalized.

The district court’s second hypothetical posited that an individual could be charged with stalking for harassing an ex-spouse by threatening to cause self-harm. The hypothetical threat to cause self-harm doesn’t implicate unresolved First Amendment issues and thus falls within the scope of what could constitute harassment under federal law. But it doesn’t involve the threatened use of physical force “against the person or property of another.”

The district court’s hypotheticals bolstered its conclusion that the offense of stalking could theoretically be charged based on conduct that didn’t qualify as a “crime of violence” under Section 924 and thus, under Supreme Court precedent, Counts 3 and 4 must be dismissed.

But the court called on the Supreme Court to reexamine its precedent requiring application of the categorical approach in the context of firearms offenses. It noted that while applying this approach may make sense in other contexts—such as to determine whether a prior conviction qualifies as crime of violence under the Armed Career Criminal Act—it doesn’t make sense when determining whether the government can add gun charges to increase the possible penalties for someone who chose to commit a criminal offense using a gun.

In the context of the Armed Career Criminal Act, the categorical approach addressed concerns outlined in Apprendi v. New Jersey, namely that any fact that increases someone’s maximum punishment must be found by a jury.

But here, where a jury would necessarily have to determine whether Mangione intended to and did cause the death of Thompson by using a firearm, there are no such concerns and no need to apply a categorical or modified categorical approach.

For the Supreme Court to reexamine its precedent, at least as applied in the Mangione case, the government would need to take an interlocutory appeal to the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and, assuming the Second Circuit affirms the district court’s decision, petition the Supreme Court for review of that decision.

This could take years and would delay the prosecution of Mangione in a way that may not be in the interests of justice. After all, he still faces life in prison on the stalking counts and murder charges brought by Manhattan District Attorney’s Office.

Rather than longing for a possible Supreme Court decision, those who are puzzled by the results of this one should turn look toward Congress. Congress has long had the power—and perhaps the publicity of the absurd result in this case will give it the political will—to close loopholes created by the Supreme Court’s dramatic expansion of the categorical and modified categorical approaches.

For one, Congress could redefine Section 924(c)(3) to make clear that Section 924 wasn’t merely designed to punish the use of firearms in connection with an increasingly small subset of offenses that qualify as crime of violence under Supreme Court precedent. Congress could amend it to clarify that the statute was designed to punish those who choose to commit violent conduct—not offenses—and choose to do so using the most common deadly weapon in this country.

That is what Mangione allegedly did and it is up to Congress to decide whether such conduct—at least in the future—warrants the imposition of additional statutory penalties.

The case is USA v. Mangione, S.D.N.Y., 1:25-cr-00176, Opinion 1/30/26.

This article does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Bloomberg Industry Group, Inc., the publisher of Bloomberg Law and Bloomberg Tax, or its owners.

Author Information

Michael Landman, partner at Bird Marella, is a trial lawyer who has won an acquittal in one of the largest fraud prosecutions ever brought by the Department of Justice.

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Landman is a 2025 Bloomberg Law “They’ve Got Next: The 40 Under 40" honoree.