Noted attorney Alan Dershowitz raised questions Monday about one detail in the arrest of a suspect in the killing of UnitedHealth Group CEO Brian Thompson.
On Monday, police in Altoona, Pa. arrested Luigi Mangione, a person of interest in the fatal Dec. 4 shooting of Thompson, following an extensive manhunt. Dershowitz, a former Harvard law school professor, said that police may have violated Mangione’s rights in their search after the arrest, potentially endangering a conviction for the killing.
“I’m a little nervous about one aspect of the arrest. According to newspaper reports… when they arrested him, they found in his possession a series of documents relating to insurance companies. I don’t think that was based on a constitutional search,” Dershowitz said. “Get mad at me, but I believe in the Constitution. Look, I want this guy to be convicted if he did it, and obviously, it seems 99.999999% certain that he did it, notwithstanding the presumption of innocence, but I insist every I be dotted, every T be crossed when it comes to the Constitution.”
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“Now the rules are this: When you arrest somebody, you can conduct a search that is consistent with the arrest and you can make sure you he has no guns, you can make sure he has no knives, no weapons, nothing like that, no means of escape, that’s all legitimate,” Dershowitz added. “But if you find in his pocket, you know a series of documents, there are cases, it’s not clear, that suggest before you read the documents, let’s assume… they were enclosed in an envelope, or they weren’t, there was more than one page, before you go inside the document, you may very well need a search warrant.”
The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution prohibits unreasonable search and seizure. Failure to obtain a search warrant outside certain exceptions can result in a judge excluding evidence obtained in the search, according to Findlaw.
“It would have been easily obtainable, and you know, maybe no harm no foul, but the police should have obtained a search warrant,” Dershowitz said. “Maybe they did… But particularly when you have a case that’s so obvious and so apparent, police should do everything in their power to avoid giving the defense any arguments at all, the same thing happened in the O.J. Simpson case, they so clearly climbed over the fence, made up a story that that they were there to protect him.”
“I don’t want to see anything endangering a potential conviction in this case,” Dershowitz said later.
Republished with permission from The Daily Caller News Foundation.
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