The way people are acting about Mangione's guilty plea is pissing me off. Again, much of the evidence they had against Mangione was seriously flawed or capable of being planted. Much of it should have been inadmissable. This is something we shouldn't cede because guilt needs to be proven beyond reasonable doubt in court. They did not do that. Many reasonable doubts remained, particularly for police forces we know have a history of fabricating evidence. Further, the strategy of the state is to pressure defendants into putting in a guilty plea on some kind of bargain. The reason Mangione did this is to get around the federal death penalty. Every day, people in America plead guilty to crimes they didn't do, because the cost of being found guilty by trial is too severe, and they have been intimidated or coerced to compliance. We have reason to believe Mangione was physically tortured at the beginning of all this. The guy has been the target of years of media campaign. There's no way he would have gotten a fair trial. As soon as he was arrested, everyone just accepted it was him. He could have gotten the death penalty. This is the exact kind of circumstance where people plead guilty to shit they didn't do.
It is less about this specific case and more about the principle of the matter. Particularly in a case so high-profile, we need to scrutinize the case of the state as much as humanly possible. We need to maintain awareness of how the state operates, how it prosecutes, how it punishes. This same pattern has played out with unknowable quantities of other people being ground to paste in the machinery of the prison industrial complex. This is a conversation everyone in America needs to be having. These are maneuvers every American needs to be aware of, particularly as the police state kicks into higher gear than we've ever seen it before. We cannot trust state prosecution. You need to maintain your skepticism, not for this case, but for all the cases that are going to follow it. We all need to hang onto this together.
