Luigi Mangione's Partial Suppression was a Total Win

Suppression motions are rarely granted, for many reasons

On Monday, a New York State judge in the Luigi Mangione case handed down a decision that many called a “split” or “partial” win for the defense. That’s technically true: the Court denied the defense’s motion to suppress in part, and granted it in part. But that belies the reality: This was a massive win for the defense.

New York State Supreme Court Justice Gregory Carro ruled that the loaded magazine, cellphone, passport, wallet, and computer chip that Altoona police pulled out of Mangione’s backpack at a McDonald’s last December were seized in violation of the New York Constitution, and cannot be used against him at trial.

Suppression motions are always long shots. They are filed in nearly every case with physical evidence, and they almost always lose. Judges tend to find that the search was reasonable, that an exception applied, that the officer acted in good faith, or that the defendant lacked standing. And, in fairness, most of the time, the police are trying to follow their training and avoid violating constitutional rights.

Carro’s ruling cuts against that current — and it cuts in a case where the political pressure to admit every scrap of evidence is enormous.

The legal pivot point was the “grabbable area” doctrine. Under New York’s interpretation of search-incident-to-arrest, officers can search containers near an arrestee only if those containers are within reach and there is a reasonable basis to believe the suspect could grab a weapon or destroy evidence. By the time the Altoona officers were rifling through Mangione’s backpack, he was handcuffed, surrounded by as many as eight officers, and the backpack had been moved nine feet away. The court found that the bag was under “exclusive control of the police.” That means there was no exigency. The officers’ claim that they were searching for a bomb was undermined by their own conduct: they conducted the “safety” search in a public hallway customers were walking through, stopped once they found the magazine, and lingered over a wallet and a small cardboard sleeve no reasonable officer believes might contain an explosive.

Just as important, Carro rejected the prosecution’s attempt to retroactively salvage the search through Pennsylvania’s good-faith exception or the independent-source doctrine. New York law applied because New York is the forum, and New York has no good-faith exception. The later Pennsylvania warrant could not repair the earlier illegality because it relied, in part, on the very evidence the police had already unlawfully seized. And that makes sense: Police shouldn’t be able to clean up their own violations of constitutional protections just because they are able to secure a warrant later on.

The reality is that judges also don’t like granting suppression motions. I get it. Suppression is a strange remedy. By its very nature, it excludes only incriminating evidence. No defendant ever moves to suppress evidence that helps them. The exclusionary rule does not undo the search, restore privacy, or compensate the person whose rights were violated. It does exactly one thing: it makes it harder to convict the person whose rights were violated. That means, in some cases, a guilty person walks — or at least walks more easily — because the police cut a corner (and not because he’s innocent).

People find this maddening. It’s understandable. A loaded magazine, recovered from a backpack, that the trier of fact will never see, in a homicide prosecution.

But this is the bargain the Fourth Amendment strikes, and it is a bargain we make on purpose. The framers were not naïve about the costs of restraining police power; they had lived under writs of assistance and chose constraint anyway. We do not trust officers to discipline themselves about constitutional rights, because the incentives run the other way — clearance rates, public pressure, the natural human urge to look inside the bag. The only sanction that actually changes police behavior at the moment of the search is the knowledge that what they find may be useless in court. The price of that deterrent, paid in individual cases, is that some guilty people benefit.

Mangione may or may not be one of them. That is what the trial is for.