Mangione in Jeopardy

How One Guilty Plea Reopened a 2,000-Year-Old Question About the Government’s Right to Prosecute Twice

Ne Bis In Idem

Not Twice for the Same Thing

A little more than one week ago, Luigi Mangione walked into a federal courtroom in lower Manhattan and did something that, on its face, was entirely unremarkable.

He pleaded guilty.

Appearing before U.S. District Judge Margaret M. Garnett in the Southern District of New York, Mangione pleaded guilty to the two federal charges still pending against him — interstate stalking resulting in death and stalking through the use of interstate facilities resulting in death — arising from the December 2024 killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.

THE PLEA WITHOUT A BARGAIN

Criminal defendants plead guilty every day in courthouses across America. In fact, despite the constitutional right to trial, remarkably few criminal cases ever reach one. In the federal system, 98 percent of criminal cases resulting in conviction in fiscal year 2025 were resolved by guilty plea rather than trial.

Anyone who has watched enough Law & Order — or listened to enough true-crime podcasts — understands why.

It is the plea bargain.

The modern American criminal justice system processes an enormous volume of cases, and it could not realistically try every defendant who passes through its doors. So prosecutors and defendants bargain. In exchange for a guilty plea, prosecutors may dismiss charges, permit a defendant to plead guilty to a lesser offense, recommend a reduced sentence or otherwise limit the defendant’s potential exposure.

The defendant gives up something extraordinarily valuable: the constitutional right to force the government to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt before a judge or jury.

In return, the defendant ordinarily gets something.

But a plea bargain requires a bargain.

And that is what made Luigi Mangione’s guilty plea so unusual.

There wasn’t one.

Federal prosecutors offered Mangione no plea agreement. They dismissed no charge in exchange for his plea. They made no promise to recommend leniency. To the contrary, prosecutors announced that they intend to ask Judge Garnett to sentence Mangione to life in prison.

Nor was Mangione pleading guilty to escape the death penalty. That possibility had already disappeared months earlier, when Judge Garnett dismissed the federal murder and related firearms charges that had made the case death-penalty eligible.

So why would one of the most closely watched criminal defendants in America voluntarily surrender his right to a federal trial when prosecutors apparently gave him nothing in return?

The answer may lie not in what Mangione received from federal prosecutors, but in what his guilty plea potentially accomplished in another courtroom.

Twenty-five days after Mangione entered his plea, he had been scheduled to begin jury selection in an entirely separate prosecution in Manhattan state court, where he still faced a charge of murder for the killing of Thompson.

The timing was no accident of which Mangione’s lawyers were unaware. For nearly a year, they had been fighting over which government would get to prosecute him first.

Mangione’s attorneys had previously asked the state judge, Justice Gregory Carro, to allow the federal prosecution to proceed before the New York case. Carro refused. Mangione had also raised New York’s unusually broad protections against successive prosecutions. Carro concluded that the argument was premature: there had been no prior federal prosecution within the meaning of New York’s double-jeopardy law — Mangione had neither pleaded guilty nor been convicted or acquitted, and no federal jury had been sworn.

By the summer of 2026, the two courts had placed Mangione in a procedural vise. His New York murder trial was scheduled to begin in September. His federal trial would not begin until January 2027.

If both trials proceeded according to that calendar, New York would necessarily go first.

Then, on August 14, Mangione changed the sequence himself.

He pleaded guilty in federal court.

And almost immediately afterward, his lawyers returned to state court and asked Justice Carro to dismiss the New York murder prosecution.

Their argument rested upon one of the oldest protections known to Western law — a principle whose history stretches back through English common law and, ultimately, more than two thousand years.

Ne bis in idem.

Not twice for the same thing.

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BRIAN THOMPSON - HUSBAND, FATHER, AND SON

Before going deeper into the legal protections now being invoked by Luigi Mangione, it is important not to lose sight of Brian Thompson, the family he left behind, and how we ended up here in the first place.

Luigi Nicholas Mangione, born in 1998 in Towson, Maryland, is the youngest child of a prominent and wealthy Baltimore-area family whose businesses included country clubs, nursing homes, and real estate. He graduated as valedictorian of the elite Gilman School in 2016 before earning both a bachelor’s and master’s degree in computer science and engineering in 2020 from the University of Pennsylvania, an Ivy League school and one of the world’s preeminent educational institutions. After working as a data engineer, he later lived in Hawaii, where he struggled with severe chronic back pain from spondylolisthesis that worsened after a surfing injury and required spinal surgery; in his 2026 guilty plea, he cited years of that pain, difficulties navigating the health insurance system, and seeing similar experiences among others as central to his actions. Nothing in that résumé suggested the path that would follow: from an elite education and a promising career in technology to a Manhattan sidewalk, where prosecutors say he stalked and killed a man he had never met.

Thompson, the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare, was shot and killed on a Manhattan sidewalk shortly before 7 a.m. on December 4, 2024. Federal prosecutors alleged that Mangione had traveled across state lines for the purpose of stalking and killing Thompson and then waited near West 54th Street before approaching him from behind and firing several shots. New York prosecutors separately charged Mangione with intentionally causing Thompson’s death. Mangione has now admitted in federal court to conduct that resulted in Thompson’s killing, while the New York murder charge remains pending.

Mangione’s lawyers explored a psychiatric defense in New York, but it was not an insanity defense. New York’s doctrine of extreme emotional disturbance could have reduced murder to manslaughter without requiring Mangione to prove that he was incapable of understanding what he was doing. Federal law offered no comparable extreme emotional disturbance defense. Its insanity standard was far narrower, requiring proof by clear and convincing evidence that a severe mental disease or defect left Mangione unable to appreciate the nature or wrongfulness of his acts. His lawyers never appear to have formally pursued that defense in the federal case.

These facts are cold and brutal. Brian Thompson was 50 years old. He had risen from working-class roots in rural Iowa to become chief executive of UnitedHealthcare, one of the nation’s largest health insurers. His family remembered him as “an incredibly loving husband, son, brother and friend.” On December 9, 2024, five days after Thompson was killed, he was laid to rest at a private funeral service at a Lutheran church in Maple Grove, Minnesota, surrounded by his family and close friends.

Whatever grievances Mangione may have believed he held against the American health insurance system, Thompson’s family was left to bury a husband, father, son and brother who had been shot from behind on a Manhattan sidewalk. After Mangione’s guilty plea, his family acknowledged that while “nothing will ease the pain of losing him,” the plea represented an important step toward accountability.

It would therefore be understandable to ask why, in a case involving conduct Mangione has now admitted in federal court, we should spend so much time examining the constitutional and legal protections available to him.

The answer goes to the very purpose of those protections.

Constitutional rights are not reserved for sympathetic defendants. They do not disappear when the evidence appears overwhelming, the crime is horrifying or the accused is unpopular. In fact, it is precisely in cases such as these that those protections matter most. A legal system cannot meaningfully claim to protect the innocent unless it is willing to enforce the same rules when doing so protects someone the public may already believe to be guilty.

That principle is fundamental to understanding what is happening now in the Mangione prosecutions. The question is not whether Brian Thompson’s killing was horrific. It was. Nor is it whether his family deserves justice. They do. The question is whether the government must nevertheless abide by the limits the law places upon its power to prosecute.

AN ANCIENT PROMISE

The protections contained in the United States Constitution were not created from whole cloth by the Founding Fathers. Many were inherited from centuries of English common law, colonial practice and older Western legal traditions. Some reflected an even more fundamental idea: that there are limits on what government may do to an individual, even when the government is pursuing someone accused of a terrible crime.

Few protections have a more ancient pedigree than the one we now call double jeopardy.

Justice Neil Gorsuch traced that history back more than two thousand years in his 2019 dissent in Gamble v. United States. In fourth-century B.C. Athens, the statesman and orator Demosthenes described a rule against trying a person twice for the same offense.

Roman law developed related protections against repeated prosecution, and the principle, in one form or another, survived the fall of Rome and eventually became embedded in English common law.

By the eighteenth century, it was sufficiently established that Sir William Blackstone — the English jurist whose Commentaries on the Laws of England profoundly influenced generations of American lawyers — described it not merely as a rule, but as a “universal maxim” of English common law.

Between 1765 and 1769, Blackstone published the four volumes of his Commentaries. In the fourth volume, addressing criminal law, he explained the ancient common-law plea of autrefois acquit — literally, “formerly acquitted”:

“First, the plea of autrefois acquit, or a former acquittal, is grounded on this universal maxim of the common law of England, that no man is to be brought into jeopardy of his life, more than once, for the same offence. And hence it is allowed as a consequence, that when a man is once fairly found not guilty upon any indictment, or other prosecution, he may plead such acquittal in bar of any subsequent accusation for the same crime.”

— Sir William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England

Blackstone also recognized the companion plea of autrefois convict — “formerly convicted.” Whether the first proceeding ended in acquittal or conviction, the underlying principle was the same: government was not supposed to place a person in jeopardy twice for the same crime.

Blackstone’s Commentaries became enormously influential in colonial and early American legal thought. And less than a generation later, the same ancient principle appeared in the Bill of Rights.

The Fifth Amendment provides:

“No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.”

— Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution

The linguistic resemblance is difficult to miss.

Blackstone wrote that “no man is to be brought into jeopardy of his life, more than once, for the same offence.”

The Fifth Amendment prohibited a person from being “for the same offence … twice put in jeopardy of life or limb.”

But buried within those few words — and particularly within the seemingly ordinary phrase “same offence” — was a question that would trouble American courts for more than two centuries.

What, exactly, is the same offense?

It turns out that the answer to that seemingly simple question — and the meaning of one innocuous word — depends largely on whom you ask, and where you ask it.

Under the United States Constitution, the answer is one thing. Stand in a courtroom in England, Germany or France, and it may be another. Cross from Georgia into Alabama, and American federalism introduces yet another complication. And in New York, where Luigi Mangione is waiting to learn whether he will ever face a jury for murder, state law provides protections beyond those guaranteed by the federal Constitution, and the answer may be something entirely different.

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TWO SOVEREIGNS, ONE CRIME

Mangione was first charged by New York state authorities: on December 9, 2024 (the day of his arrest in Altoona, Pennsylvania), Manhattan prosecutors issued an arrest warrant for second-degree murder, weapons offenses, and forgery; then on the 17th of December the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office announced a formal 11-count New York State Supreme Court indictment charging him with one count of Murder in the First Degree (in furtherance of terrorism), two counts of Murder in the Second Degree (one as a crime of terrorism and one intentional), two counts of Criminal Possession of a Weapon in the Second Degree, four counts of Criminal Possession of a Weapon in the Third Degree, one count of Criminal Possession of a Weapon in the Fourth Degree, and one count of Criminal Possession of a Forged Instrument in the Second Degree. On December 19th he waived extradition in Blair County, Pennsylvania court.

Mangione was then transferred to New York City and immediately taken into federal custody, because that same day federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York unsealed a complaint charging him with four counts—interstate stalking resulting in death, stalking through use of interstate facilities resulting in death, murder through use of a firearm, and discharging a firearm equipped with a silencer in furtherance of a crime of violence—and he made his first New York appearance that afternoon in Manhattan federal court before Magistrate Judge Katharine H. Parker. He was arraigned on the state charges four days later, on December 23, in New York State Supreme Court, where he pleaded not guilty; federal and state prosecutors publicly stated the cases would proceed in parallel, with the state prosecution expected to go to trial first. In the meantime, he’s being held without bail in Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC Brooklyn), a federal facility in Sunset Park, Brooklyn.

Before his August 2026 guilty plea, two major sets of charges were dismissed. In September 2025, New York State Supreme Court Justice Gregory Carro dismissed the two terrorism-related counts (Murder in the First Degree in furtherance of terrorism and Murder in the Second Degree as a crime of terrorism), finding the evidence legally insufficient, while leaving intact the intentional second-degree murder count and the weapons and forgery charges. In January 2026, U.S. District Judge Margaret Garnett dismissed the federal murder-through-use-of-a-firearm count and the related silencer/firearms offense, eliminating the death penalty; only the two interstate stalking counts (both resulting in death) remained. No new charges were added after the original state indictment and federal complaint.

With that backdrop — more than two thousand years of legal history, centuries of English common law, and a Fifth Amendment that seemingly prohibits a person from being placed in jeopardy twice for the same offense — an obvious question arises:

How can federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York and state prosecutors in the New York County Supreme Court each prosecute Luigi Mangione for crimes arising from the killing of the same man, Brian Thompson?

The answer lies in one seemingly simple word in the Fifth Amendment — “offence” — and in the United States Supreme Court’s 2019 decision in Gamble v. United States, 587 U.S. 678 (2019).

TERANCE MARTEZ GAMBLE

Before examining what the Supreme Court actually held in Gamble, let’s take a step back and refresh ourselves on exactly what role each player serves in America’s judicial system. As any high school student in the midst of U.S. History and Government class can tell you, the legislative branch writes the laws; the executive branch, including its prosecutors, enforces them; and the judicial branch interprets those laws as they apply to particular cases. As Chief Justice John Marshall so eloquently stated in one of the seminal cases of American constitutional law:

“It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is. Those who apply the rule to particular cases, must of necessity expound and interpret that rule.”

— Marbury v. Madison, 5 U.S. (1 Cranch) 137, 177 (1803).

And in 2019, the Supreme Court was asked to say precisely what the words “same offence” mean. On the night of November 29, 2015, a Mobile, Alabama, police officer pulled over Terance Martez Gamble for a damaged headlight. Smelling marijuana, the officer searched the car and found a loaded 9mm handgun, along with marijuana and a digital scale. That mattered because Gamble had been convicted in Alabama state court on September 4, 2008 — roughly seven years earlier — of second-degree robbery, a “crime of violence” that made his gun possession illegal under both Alabama state law as well as U.S. federal law. One crime triggered criminal liability under two separate statutes. Alabama charged him first. He pleaded guilty to state felon-in-possession and drug-possession charges and was sentenced to ten years, all but one year suspended. In practical terms, Gamble was sentenced to serve one year. A federal grand jury in the Southern District of Alabama then indicted him on April 28, 2016 (before his state sentencing) for possessing the very same firearm. He moved to dismiss on double jeopardy grounds, lost, entered a conditional guilty plea preserving the issue, and drew a federal sentence of 46 months. Even running concurrently with the state term, the federal case put him behind bars nearly three additional years — which is what carried the case to the Supreme Court where he lost 7–2 in Gamble v. United States, 587 U.S. 678 (2019) (Alito, J.), with Ginsburg and Gorsuch dissenting.

If you’re familiar with American politics, the case citation above might cause you to wonder whether it was written in error. The two dissenting justices were Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Neil Gorsuch — one appointed by President Bill Clinton and an icon of the American left, the other appointed by President Donald Trump after campaigning on a promise to place conservative, textualist judges on the Supreme Court.

Yet there is no mistake. On this issue, Ginsburg and Gorsuch — two justices with seemingly polar-opposite judicial and political pedigrees — arrived at essentially the same conclusion. And that unlikely agreement should tell us something about just how deeply the dual-sovereignty doctrine cuts across the usual ideological lines.

The seven-Justice majority in Gamble, held that Terance Gamble’s successive prosecutions by the State of Alabama and the federal government did not violate the Double Jeopardy Clause of the Fifth Amendment. Writing for the Court, Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr. rested the decision on the text of the Clause, which bars a second prosecution for the same “offence” — not for the same conduct. As Alito put it, “an ‘offence’ is defined by a law, and each law is defined by a sovereign. So where there are two sovereigns, there are two laws, and two ‘offences.’” According to Alito’s opinion, because Alabama and the United States are separate sovereigns drawing their authority from distinct sources, each was free to prosecute Gamble for the same act of possessing the same handgun. The Court also declined Gamble’s invitation to abandon the “dual-sovereignty” doctrine, which it traced through roughly 170 years and dozens of decisions. Under stare decisis — Latin for “to stand by things decided,” the principle that courts adhere to their prior rulings — overturning that line of cases required a “special justification” beyond a belief that the precedent was wrongly decided, and Alito found Gamble’s historical evidence from English and early American common law too “feeble” to supply one. Justice Clarence Thomas concurred, but took issue with the stare decisis part of the opinion, agreeing with the result but writing separately to argue that a court should never adhere to a demonstrably erroneous reading of the Constitution.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in her dissenting separate opinion, argued that the separate-sovereigns doctrine “should be [a] relic” and that the Court’s syllogism — one offense per sovereign — is “fatally flawed” because it mistakes which entity our Constitution actually treats as sovereign. In her view, the Double Jeopardy Clause “by its terms safeguards the ‘person’ and restrains the government,” so the relevant question is what the individual endures, not how many governments wish a turn at him.

Drawing on Hamilton’s Federalist No. 82, she reminded the Court that the States and the Federal Government are “parts of ONE WHOLE,” and that Madison’s “double security” of divided government in Federalist No. 51 was designed to protect the rights of the people, not to be inverted into a tool against them: the two governments “should be disabled from accomplishing together ‘what neither government [could] do alone—prosecute an ordinary citizen twice for the same offence.’” She also pressed a decisive doctrinal shift the majority glossed over — the dual-sovereignty cases were built when the Fifth Amendment restrained only the federal government, and Benton v. Maryland, 395 U.S. 784 (1969), incorporated the Clause against the States through the Fourteenth Amendment, knocking out the premise the doctrine had rested on. On stare decisis, she noted that the pull of precedent is at its weakest for procedural rules implicating fundamental constitutional protections and dismissed the practical safeguards the government invoked: the Blockburger same-elements test lets most parallel charges through untouched, and the Justice Department’s internal Petite policy against duplicative prosecutions is unenforceable by defendants. She would not let Gamble’s liberty be frittered away, in the old phrase she borrowed, “upon a metaphysical subtlety, two sovereignties.”

Justice Neil Gorsuch, also writing only for himself, opened with the line the case is now remembered for: “A free society does not allow its government to try the same individual for the same crime until it’s happy with the result,” and charged that the Court had endorsed “a colossal exception to this ancient rule against double jeopardy.”

His attack was primarily textual and historical. On text, he found that “the government identifies no evidence suggesting that the framers understood the term ‘same offence’ to bear such a lawyerly sovereign-specific meaning” — the words protect a person from a second jeopardy for the same wrong, full stop. On history, he traced English and early American authority treating a prior conviction or acquittal, even by a different sovereign, as a bar, and he attacked the doctrine’s pedigree: it began as dicta in antebellum cases like Fox v. Ohio and Moore v. Illinois — cases entangled with the era’s fugitive-slave politics — and only hardened into a holding in United States v. Lanza, 260 U.S. 377 (1922), a product of Prohibition-era enthusiasm for overlapping state and federal enforcement. He then made the point in plain language, imagining the explanation owed to a defendant: “Yes, you were sentenced to state prison for being a felon in possession of a firearm. And don’t worry—the State can’t prosecute you again. But a federal prosecutor can send you to prison again for exactly the same thing... And the federal prosecutor can pursue you even if you were acquitted in the state case. None of that offends the Constitution’s plain words... Really?” As to stare decisis, he insisted that precedent “is not an inexorable command” and that the sheer repetition of an error over 170 years cannot ratify it, least of all where an individual liberty guarantee is at stake. He closed where he began: “the Constitution promises all Americans that they will never suffer double jeopardy. I would enforce that guarantee.”

WHAT IF GAMBLE HAD BEEN DRIVING IN EUROPE?

Now imagine that Terance Gamble had been driving not along a road in Mobile, Alabama, but through the English countryside, along Germany’s Autobahn, or through the streets of Paris. What would have happened then? After all, much of American law descended from our European cousins, including this ancient principle that a person should not be tried twice for the same crime.

The answer, generally speaking, is that Gamble would not have faced the peculiar American experience of being prosecuted by one domestic sovereign and then prosecuted again by another for possessing the very same handgun.

In England and Wales, the common-law pleas of autrefois acquit and autrefois convict traditionally barred a second prosecution following an acquittal or conviction for the same offense. Parliament modified that ancient rule in 2003, permitting a retrial for certain exceptionally serious crimes — including murder — when new and compelling evidence emerges and the Court of Appeal authorizes another prosecution. But that is a carefully defined exception to double jeopardy, not an American-style rule allowing two domestic sovereigns their own separate opportunity to prosecute the same conduct.

In Germany, the protection is even more explicit. Article 103(3) of Germany’s Basic Law provides that no person may be punished more than once for the same act under the general criminal laws. In 2023, Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court struck down legislation that would have permitted certain acquitted defendants to be retried when powerful new evidence of guilt emerged. The court held that ne bis in idem protects against repeated prosecution itself, not merely repeated punishment, and that within its constitutional sphere, legal certainty takes precedence over even the government’s interest in correcting a potentially erroneous acquittal.

And in France, the ancient principle survives under its familiar name: ne bis in idem. A final conviction or acquittal generally prevents another prosecution for the same criminal matter, while France is also bound, when applicable, by European Union law, whose Charter of Fundamental Rights expressly protects a person who has been finally acquitted or convicted from being tried or punished again for the same criminal offense within the Union.

None of these systems maps perfectly onto American law, and each contains procedural exceptions and qualifications of its own. But the comparison exposes what is unusual about Gamble. The American rule does not merely ask whether Terance Gamble had already been prosecuted for possessing that handgun. It asks who prosecuted him.

Alabama had its turn.

But under the Supreme Court’s dual-sovereignty doctrine, Alabama’s prosecution did not exhaust the power of the United States.

The federal government was entitled to a turn of its own.

If you value legal journalism that goes beyond the headline — digging into the cases, the history and the law to explain not just what happened, but why it matters — subscribe to Short Stop Media. Subscriptions are FREE, and paid options are available for readers who want to directly support this kind of independent, deeply researched work.

BACK TO THE SOUTHERN DISTRICT OF NEW YORK

All of this brings us back to Luigi Mangione and to the seemingly inexplicable decision he made a little more than one week ago in a federal courtroom in lower Manhattan.

Pleading guilty to charges carrying the possibility of life imprisonment, without a plea agreement and without any promise of leniency from prosecutors, would ordinarily seem like an extraordinary surrender. But Mangione was not facing one sovereign. He was facing two — each prosecuting crimes arising from the killing of Brian Thompson, each possessing the power to imprison him for the remainder of his life.

And the calendar had boxed him in.

Mangione’s lawyers had previously asked Justice Gregory Carro to allow the federal prosecution to go first. Carro refused. When Mangione raised New York’s protections against successive prosecutions, Carro told him the argument was premature: there had not yet been a prior prosecution. By this summer, New York was scheduled to put Mangione before a jury in September, while his federal trial would not begin until January.

Then, twenty-five days before New York jury selection, Mangione changed the sequence himself.

He pleaded guilty federally.

In doing so, Mangione obtained something federal prosecutors had never offered him: a completed federal prosecution before the New York trial began.

Almost immediately, his lawyers returned to Justice Carro and invoked New York law.

That distinction matters because while the Supreme Court’s decision in Gamble permits successive prosecutions by separate sovereigns under the federal Constitution, New York has chosen to provide its citizens with greater protection. Article 40 of New York’s Criminal Procedure Law generally prohibits a person from being separately prosecuted for two offenses based upon the same act or criminal transaction, subject to specifically defined exceptions.

That is now the battlefield.

The Manhattan District Attorney will argue that the surviving New York murder prosecution falls within one or more of those exceptions. Mangione’s lawyers will argue that he has already been prosecuted federally for crimes arising from the stalking and killing of Brian Thompson and that New York law therefore commands something the federal Constitution does not: stop.

For now, that question has brought the state prosecution to a halt: Justice Carro has indefinitely postponed the September 8 murder trial while he considers Mangione’s double-jeopardy motion, with prosecutors due to respond by October 9.

Justice Carro will have to decide who is right.

And when he does, he will be confronting a question considerably older than Luigi Mangione, Brian Thompson, the United States Constitution or the country itself.

How many opportunities should government have to take away one person’s liberty for the same underlying act?

The Supreme Court answered that question in Gamble: when separate sovereigns enact separate laws, each may have its own opportunity.

New York chose a different path.

More than two thousand years after the principle first appeared in the Western legal tradition, and more than 250 years after Blackstone described it as a “universal maxim” of English common law, those three ancient words have found their way into a Manhattan courtroom once again:

Ne bis in idem.

Not twice for the same thing.

Whether New York law will make those words meaningful for Luigi Mangione is now up to Justice Gregory Carro.