Thieves Have Excuses

Bill Sanders

August 19, 2025

Many admire Luigi Mangione’s December 4, 2024, killing of Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare. Fans gather at his court appearances holding signs saying “Free Luigi” under pictures of him dressed as Luigi, the brother of Mario from the famous video game. More serious demonstrators display placards warning that “privatized healthcare is a crime” and “murder for profit is terrorism.” Further support for Mangione can be found in online forums and graffiti around America and Europe. Beyond those offering explicit support are the indifferent, not caring about the killing of a man they didn’t know, maybe even considering it a reckoning.

The act that won such praise happened shortly before sunrise in Midtown Manhattan, where unemployed 26-year-old Mangione shot Thompson in the back as the CEO walked to a business meeting. Police caught Mangione five days later, a couple of hundred miles from the scene. At his arrest, they confiscated a handwritten letter he’d addressed to authorities, in which he apologized for any trauma he’d caused, but said that “it had to be done[,]” and that “these parasites simply had it coming.” He lamented that while UnitedHealthcare grew into America’s largest health insurance company, the country’s average lifespan had not increased. He accused insurance companies of “abus[ing] our country for immense profit[.]” Mangione admitted that the problem was “more complex” than that, but he did “not have space” to “lay out the full argument” and did “not pretend to be the most qualified person” to do so. Despite the problem’s complexity and his lack of expertise, he felt that it justified murder, claiming to be “the first to face [the problem] with such brutal honesty.”

Arguments rationalizing Mangione’s act, according to signs at rallies and posts on the internet, align with his reasoning, such as it is. Construed generously, they can be distilled into the following: UnitedHealthcare sometimes refuses to pay for medical care for people who need it and cannot afford it; Thompson was the leader of UnitedHealthcare; therefore, in killing Thompson, Mangione brought him to justice and shined a light (or “started a conversation,” in the parlance of our times) on problems related to health insurance in America.

Western culture celebrates vigilante justice. It’s often the basis of superhero sagas, depicting characters with the courage and wit to combat evil that society is too cowardly and corrupt to face. Those who condone Mangione’s act imply that it constitutes such heroism. Yet, he engaged in no courageous combat when he shot Thompson in the back, and there is no evidence of justice in what he did. His note accuses health insurance companies of abusing the country, citing stagnant life expectancy as evidence, but he did not attempt to show that any failure of life spans to rise is attributable to insurance companies, or how such attribution could justify killing a CEO. Indeed, beyond failing to allege an actual crime that Thompson committed, neither Mangione nor his supporters appear to give any attention at all to actions he took or decisions he made, as CEO or otherwise.

Murder is an act of homicide done without justification, such as self-defense. With few exceptions, murder laws in America are rooted in British common law, which developed through centuries of judicial opinions. They embody, to an extent, the morality upon which Western civilization rests. The law prohibits unjustified homicide because of the moral principle holding that every person has inherent value. Murder law is concerned with behavior and intent – whether the accused performed the act that caused the homicide, and whether he intended, in performing that act, to cause the death. There is no question that Mangione shot the gun that killed Thompson, and that his intent when shooting that gun was for the bullet to hit and kill him. The elements of murder are thus met. Those cheering Mangione and demanding that he be freed must believe that the law fails to account for an essential element of justice. Because the law embodies Western morality, their support for Mangione is support for the idea that this morality is incorrect.

It’s unclear what a correct morality, in their eyes, would look like. It would be one under whose principles Mangione would be free, but the nature of those principles is vague. Some claim to want to change the healthcare system in America from private to government-run, and imagine Thompson’s murder to move public sentiment toward that goal. The moral principle derived from this holds that homicide is justified if it results in greater awareness of an aspect of society that should be improved. One problem with this principle is that if an element of society were so terrible as to justify killing an innocent man for the sake of alerting people to its danger, that element’s effects would necessarily be bad enough to be sufficiently alarming, making the killing gratuitous. A deeper problem is that it would supplant truth with power as the goal of the American justice system.

American jurisprudence purports to be blind to factors that are irrelevant to the issue or that may distort the truth. This is why, for example, facts regarding a defendant’s past crimes or unpopular opinions are generally inadmissible as evidence at a murder trial. This is premised on the moral precept that a person may be judged solely based on what he did and the intent he had in doing it. Judgements based on anything else, such as the fairness of healthcare policy, would be premised on the shifting opinions of whoever is in power. A society whose legal system is based on something other than truth will force its citizens to lie to avoid persecution and to live in fear that yesterday’s lies won’t save them today.

If, under American law, Mangione could be deemed not guilty because he killed a man who led an organization that, in the opinion of many, was unduly exploiting society, who would not live in fear of being killed? Popular opinion would guide decisions. Only the bravest would dare to doubt the consensus. Risks would not be taken, and innovation would stop. The few things of value that people retained would be vulnerable to thieves with excuses. The prosperity, order, freedom, and relative peace built up over centuries of Western civilization would disintegrate.

Mangione’s fans indulge in the fantasy of a cool rebel taking justice into his own hands, while in reality, a real man was killed, and another real man ruined his own life by killing him. By their own principles, human life has value; otherwise, where is the logic in condoning Thompson’s murder based on the premise that his company denied health care to people? They celebrate the killing of a man and justify this with incoherent slogans. Who, then, are the bad people?