By Todd Davis
Editor’s note: The opinions expressed here are those of the authors. View more opinions on ScoonTV
I’ve been called up for jury duty six times. I’m not sure what the average number is for a person, but that feels like a lot. Probability works like that sometimes. During those six tenures, I’ve only served on one jury. To be fair, one session was during COVID, and we were all dismissed one day in. Yes, that’s my luck, even during COVID, they called upon my civic duty.
Since I was only seated on one jury (it’s harder to get placed than you think), I spent many hours in the jury pool room. Reading, talking to other prospective jurors, and people watching. I believe the jury pool is the most democratic cross-section of America you’re ever going to see. There are no religious, economic, or social barriers keeping people separated. We truly are all in it together.
The experience can be eye-opening.
Most of us exist orbiting the same sun day after day. That could be kids, work, church, whatever. The people we interact with are adjacent to those priorities. Even the places we go, say Starbucks or Trader Joe’s or Walmart, expose us to a certain subgroup of people that we feel comfortable around.
No such barriers exist in a jury pool. People come from every part of the county. If you live in a county that has both rural and urban areas, a whole bunch of people whose lives normally never intersect are suddenly in a room together. As peers. And potential judges.
My biggest takeaway from six tours on jury duty is that you never want to leave your fate to that pool of people. It’s the ultimate casino bet.
Mangione
Almost everyone is familiar with Luigi Mangione, the photogenic Ivy League grad who is charged with allegedly murdering UnitedHealthCare CEO Brian Thompson on December 4, 2024. Mangione has become a populist hero in some circles, a Death Wish version of Robin Hood. A member of the proletariat who said no more to predatory capitalism.
For others, Mangione is a cold-blooded murderer. Or worse, a symbol of the radicalism simmering underneath the surface of American streets. He is the animus of people who should be happy streaming entertainment services and doom-scrolling through social media.
Maybe because of the danger he represents, the government attempted to try Mangione as a terrorist, seeking the death penalty for his alleged crime. Now, that isn’t going to happen as Judge Gregory Carro tossed out both the terrorism and first-degree murder charges. That removes the death penalty. Mangione is still going to trial for second-degree murder.
The decision has sparked an outcry among Republican circles, bringing out catcalls over “liberal” judges and how this condones political violence. While the death of Brian Thompson has been called politically motivated, I would forward the opinion that the act was economically motivated. Economic and political motivations are adjacent to each other in modern America, and with the rise of American populism, the party lines blur and cross when dealing with these flashpoint issues.
Mangione represents a refusal to buy into the line that political violence is never appropriate. The funny thing about that, though, is that the people who most benefit from the current system in the United States, which is heavily slanted toward wealth disparity brought on by technofeudalism and oligarchy, are the ones who predominantly benefit from political violence being a taboo. Historically, this has always been the case.
Political Violence
The people who most strongly push that political violence is never the answer are more often than not the beneficiaries of a system they want to remain in place. A coterie of Romanovs telling you to shut up, serf, doff your cap, and accept the status quo.
Political violence formed Russia after the Romanovs and France after the Louises. Political violence formed America when it broke away from Britain. If you want something more modern, political violence formed the fascist governments of Japan, Italy, and Germany.
Root cause for many of these? Economic plight. People can only take so much. America has been running in the red for a long time now. Two different Americas. The fabulously wealthy vs everyone else. People who can buy a Bentley versus people who can’t afford car insurance.
Most people aren’t going to do anything about it. They are going to meander along through life like zombie Americans posting on Instagram from their cracked iPhone. Political violence is a step too far for them. America might seem unfair, but not so bad that they want to blow it up and go through a stage where it looks like something from The Walking Dead.
And yet, will they convict someone who did want to blow it up?
Jury Nullification
Mangione’s best case for avoiding prison time is jury nullification. Jury nullification occurs when a jury returns a not guilty verdict, even when jurors believe, beyond a reasonable doubt, that the defendant has broken the law. Jurors may be compelled to do this if they believe the law is unjust or if they want to send a message about a social issue. They may also view themselves as balancing the scales of justice by putting themselves in the shoes of the defendant.
An excellent popular culture example of jury nullification is the 1996 movie A Time to Kill. In the movie, Samuel L. Jackson’s character shoots and kills two men after they sexually assault his young daughter. Jackson’s attorney, played by Matthew McConaughey, places the jury in Jackson’s place, asking them, What if it were your daughter?
An entire genre of revenge porn movies addresses this subject, usually skipping the whole court process and dealing with the victim of a crime seeking violent redress themselves because the law is unwilling or unable to hold the perpetrators responsible. Clearly, there is a visceral, satisfying feeling in our society of watching criminals get frontier justice.
When is a Crime, a Crime?
None of this applies to Brian Thompson, some people will say. Brian Thompson didn’t kill or assault anyone. Thompson was from Minnesota. He was Homecoming King, an accomplished athlete. He went to the University of Iowa. His success was self-made. He didn’t inherit a silver spoon. He wasn’t a Connecticut-born and bred Mr. Moneybags.
A person’s aspirational origin story doesn’t give them a blank check to commit acts of mass murder. Digging into Thompson’s tenure at UnitedHealthcare, the full picture begins to emerge. Josef Stalin is attributed as saying,
The death of one man is a tragedy; the death of a million is a statistic.
Stalin is saying that a single death can be personalized. We, as humans, feel empathy. However, when confronted by mass death, we are unable to process the enormity of it. We lose the humanization of the victims and view them as numbers on a spreadsheet.
UnitedHealthcare denies more insurance claims than any other provider. Thompson oversaw and instituted the effort to implement automatic claim denial using AI. It has been alleged that this was put in place knowing that AI would have a significant error rate in claim denial, meaning his company was denying needed care to patients regularly. Thompson was counting on a percentage of United customers being too weak and sick, or too poor, to fight for their coverage. And a percentage of those were going to die before getting it.
Thompson utilized AI to enhance these percentages, numbers in an algorithm that represent real people, ultimately to increase profits. Is this the systemic murder of thousands of people, or are we only balancing budgets, making a reasonable profit, and not worrying about what those pesky numbers represent? Is there a difference between pulling a trigger and killing someone instantly, or denying a surgery and letting them die without medical care? Is one act more premeditated than the other? And while it may be straightforward how to arrest a potential shooter, how can anyone bring UnitedHealthcare and Brian Thompson to justice under the current legal system?
Healthcare, the Bane of American Life
Let’s take Republicans at their word and accept their feverish hate of former President Obama wasn’t because he was Black, but because he brought “socialism” to America. The example most often cited is the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), which they fought with every political and emotional fiber they could muster.
Imagine that. Over a decade of political energy has been spent trying to deny people access to doctors and affordable prescriptions. And why? Because the accepted “tradition” in America is that you get healthcare from your employer? How does this even make sense? It harkens back to the coal mining towns where you could only buy food and clothes at the company store. Why should your level of employment have anything to do with your ability to see a doctor? Want your kid to be cured of whooping cough? Then you’d best go work your ten-hour shifts in the mine. It’s gross. Inhumane. And frankly, intolerable for a modern society, especially for the richest nation on the planet.
Innumerable stories exist of sick people being denied coverage, especially for what has been defined as pre-existing conditions. Thousands of people have died because health insurance companies have denied claims. Maybe a lot more. Even when someone doesn’t die because they, or their family, had assets, like houses that could be mortgaged, they find themselves hundreds of thousands in debt paying for health care prices driven up sky high by insurance companies and their partner, Big Pharma.
There comes a point when an American, or America, reaches a breaking point.
How Would You Vote?
Mangione will face a jury of his peers, and each one of them will be confronted with the question we are asking ourselves today. Would I acquit Mangione?
When the jurors sit in that room and stare across at Luigi Mangione, they won’t just be weighing a man’s life against the letter of the law. They’ll be forced to confront the system we all live under. The one that shapes how long we live, what kind of care our children get, and whether money or mercy determines who survives. Mangione is on trial, but so is the unspoken contract between citizens and the institutions meant to serve them. If that contract has been broken beyond repair, what then? Do you enforce the rules as written, or do you acknowledge the deeper truths that those rules sometimes fail to address?
Acquitting Mangione would not come without cost. A verdict of not guilty, reached through sympathy rather than strict law, risks sending a message that violence is a legitimate tool of political or economic protest. If one man can escape accountability for killing a corporate leader, what stops the next person from deciding that their private grievance justifies bloodshed? Juries are meant to be the ballast that steadies society; if they turn into accelerants for unrest, the line between justice and anarchy begins to blur.
The verdict, then, is not just about guilt or innocence. It’s about whether we as Americans believe the law is an instrument of justice, or a cage that protects privilege at the expense of human dignity. To acquit Mangione would be to declare, loudly, that the scales are broken and that sometimes justice cannot be confined to the statutes on a page. To convict him would affirm that even in a system riddled with inequity, order must be preserved above all else. And so, the question passes from the courtroom to you: If you were in that seat, looking Mangione in the eye, how would you vote? Would you acquit?
I would.
Curtis Scoon is the founder of ScoonTv.com Download the ScoonTv App to join our weekly livestream every Tuesday @ 8pm EST! Support true independent media. Become a VIP member www.scoontv.com/vip-signup/ and download the ScoonTv App from your App Store.
