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I think the issue here is that we're finding out now how much of a hash the police in Altoona made of the initial arrest, and the fact that so much of the key evidence stems from this arrest makes the prosecution a little dicier than it seemed initially. When the arrest first occurred it appeared to me, based on the reporting, that Mangione had consented to a search, which makes sense because anyone stupid enough to carry obviously incriminating evidence around with him for several days after committing murder would probably also be stupid enough to consent to a search. Now it looks like the police may have not obtained consent and instead relied on specious reasoning to determine they had probable cause and didn't need a warrant.
Now, whether this was a mistake is theoretical, because it doesn't appear to me that they would have had any justification to either get a search warrant or detain him based on an identification of a McDonald's employee who had never seen him before. The police were under pressure to investigate every lead, no matter how improbable, and I doubt they wanted it to come out later that someone had identified a mystery man whom they had questioned briefly but had eventually gotten away with a backpack that may have had incriminating evidence in it. Anyway, I suspect the judge will find the search justified and allow the case to go to trial because it's obvious that Mangione is guilty and any technicalities are an issue for the appellate court. But it looks like the police may have actually fucked up here.
It would be especially hard to get probable cause from this given that she’s a made-up person with an AI generated photo that never actually existed.
Wait, what?
•Initial reports that the identifying witness is named Nancy Parker, photo circulated by media
•there’s only one single photo of her in existence and it looks like like something a three year old instance of stable diffusion would crap out on a bad day
•initial reports that she’s 85 and lives in a nursing home and she is technically a “volunteer” at McDonalds so the press can’t interview her and there’s no actual record of her employment.
•FBI quietly says she’s not actually getting any reward money due to a technicality
•all the information about her and the photo all seem to have been subsequently retracted and scrubbed
•all subsequent media reports just call this person “the employee” and don’t give name, age or gender
•So now we have no name, no face, we don’t even know the employee’s age and gender and no one is actually getting a reward
I’ll be interested to see if this person actually testifies at the trial or if they’ll find a way around that
Initial reports from whom? Any reputable media organization? Or people on Reddit? I couldn't find anything about this woman from a reputable source. What I do know is that the police released the 911 call last week as evidence in the suppression hearing and the woman on the call most certainly wasn't an 85-year-old volunteer but someone in management who said she was reluctantly making the call at the behest of customers who insisted she do so. I mean, what's the theory here, that the police already knew who he was and where he was and made up a fictitious person to take credit for the arrest then inexplicably decided to do a U-turn, even though it would have been abundantly clear to law enforcement from the beginning that she may have to testify at trial? Not to mention that there were interviews with McDonald's patrons who were there at the time of the arrest referring to the woman as a manager. I'm not sure what the theory is here.
Yes! I think they probably traced him from New York all the way to the McDonalds with some kind of illegal-for domestic-use Palantir-type monitoring software that’s probably embedded on every cell phone in the nation. They interdicted him there, planted the evidence on him (the arresting officer that handled the backpack “accidentally” switched her body camera off while she was handling the backpack). Then they needed to write this up in some way that wouldn’t get the case thrown out of court so they ginned up this McDonald’s employee whistleblower so they had a reason for actually being there and finding him. I say this as someone who thinks what he did is morally repugnant, by the way. I think what Brian Kohbargher did was horrible too. But I’m seeing worrying signs that these types of surveillance back doors are now regularly being deployed against American citizens. It always starts being used on scumbags, then five years later it’s being used on everyone else.
The FBI doesn't need a reason to be in a McDonalds. It's not a private residence, it's open to the public and they can just go.
Maybe there were in there due to illegal surveillance, but even then it doesn't help the defendant. A defendant can't (at least how 4A law is today) argue that a search or arrest is illegal because the police were in a public place but due to information they obtained unlawfully. That information itself isn't admissible tho.
You need probable cause to actually search and arrest someone. If all your actual reasons for arresting and searching them are illegal, then the evidence collected during the search is illegal.
You need probable cause to search and arrest someone. But you don't need probable cause to be in particular McDonalds.
The latter statement is hard to interpret but might be totally wrong as well -- there is no 'actual reason' test. In fact, the Supreme Court has specifically said (unanimously) that police can stop someone for one reason (for example running a stop sign) even if their "real reason" for wanting to stop is something else (e.g. the cop believes they have drugs in the car) even if the latter reason would not on its own suffice.
All that matter is that the officer had some probable cause to arrest it, for example because she thought he looked like the mugshots of the NYC murder suspect.
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