Luigi Mangione's legal team withdraws intention to invoke psychiatric defense

[00:00:00]The United Healthcare CEO murder suspect will no longer use a psychiatric defense. The defense attorneys had told the court they would try to show he was suffering from extreme emotional disturbance before the shooting. Now they say they're changing plans. ABC News legal analyst Brian Buckmire is here with more on that. Hi Brian, why make a change like this so last minute?

[00:00:21]>> Hi Diane. Well, it's hard to tell. Of course, we have a transcript of what happened in that hearing, but I don't think that tells the full story. When it comes to extreme emotional disturbance defense or any kind of psychiatric defense, there's a lot of preparation that goes into it. There's a lot of communication with your client about what you're going to do because at its heart, if you make this type of defense, you're saying, "Yes, I committed the action, but here's an excuse as to why it's not murder." And in this case, it's manslaughter. I would suspect that someone, whether it be Luigi Manzione himself or someone who's helping to foot the bill here, said, "That's not something we want to admit." Especially because we don't just have one case against Luigi Manzione, we have two in both the state of New York and the federal system. So, a defense here could impact a federal case as well.

[00:01:05]>> As a defense attorney, does this tell you anything about the relationship between the attorneys and the defendant?

[00:01:13]Is this an indication that maybe they are disagreeing over how to go about this defense?

[00:01:19]>> Yes, it does. And you don't need to be a lawyer to kind of understand this. So, I'll break it down this way. It takes a lot of work to put in that notice that you're going to have a psychiatric defense. You've got to get your client evaluated for it. You have to make sure that the facts of the evaluation fit in with the trial itself. You have to inform your client. You have to inform whoever's paying the bill for the client. This is what we're going to do.

[00:01:39]And especially with a defense like this, it's not like self-defense where you're saying, "Hey, if we win this, you're you're walking out scot-free." This is a defense where you're saying, "Hey, you're looking at life in prison, but if we win on the EED, you now get 5 to 25 years in prison. It's a little bit better than what we're doing before."

[00:01:54]So, to file this notice and then to pull it back in this way, and have this language of we're withdrawing our notice respectfully at this moment, suggests to me that the Manjione camp is having a real come-to-Jesus, a real hard discussion of what are we going to do for defense here. And I think they're going to figure out what they're going to do. We may see this notice come back up, and we might have this actual defense at trial, or they may continue as they are now with no affirmative defense, and simply saying Manjione did not do this.

[00:02:22]>> Brian, jury selection was already going to be complicated for this case given how public it is. How much does this change now add to that?

[00:02:32]>> I think it makes it that much more confusing, but I do think jury selection overall can maybe avoid some of the confusion because just just think about it how we're looking at this now, right?

[00:02:39]We've kind of been married to this case for a while thinking about who is Luigi Manjione, what does he stand for, what does his writings tell us about him, and and we've always been in this posture of he did not do it, right? That would likely be the defense. Now we heard a defense of a psychiatric defense, now it's getting pulled back. I know why people think of defense attorneys the way they do, they think we speak out of both sides of our mouths, and if we are doing that in presenting defenses, people usually turn their ears off, and it's hard to get that not guilty. It's hard to get a juror on your side.

[00:03:07]>> All right, Brian Buckmire, thank you.