The murder charges appear strong. The terrorism allegations . . . not so much.

The Justice Department has charged Luigi Mangione with a capital murder offense for his alleged killing of health insurance executive Brian Thompson, who was gunned down execution style on a New York City street on December 4. The charges were lodged in a complaint filed Wednesday in Manhattan federal court, where Mangione was presented on Thursday after he waived extradition and was transferred from Pennsylvania.

This confirmed my assessment last week that prosecutors in my old haunts, the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York (SDNY), had to be contemplating a federal prosecution of Mangione. That might have been the case under any circumstances, but it was especially predictable after SDNY prosecutors watched from their offices down the block as Manhattan’s elected progressive Democratic district attorney, Alvin Bragg, had botched the Daniel Penny case, which never should have been brought; unabashedly politicized the prosecution of President-elect Donald Trump (including by usurping the DOJ’s unilateral authority to criminally enforce federal campaign-finance law — after the SDNY had determined there was no prosecutable case against Trump); and generally instituted woke-progressive non-enforcement policies.

Having been an SDNY prosecutor himself, Bragg was undoubtedly aware that the federal prosecutors were eyeing the case. Earlier this week, his office pushed out an indictment, which made a splash by dubiously charging Mangione with terrorist murder.

As I explained last week, Mangione was originally arrested on a second-degree murder charge because, in the 1990s, New York restricted first-degree murder to killings of police and corrections officers in the line of duty. In that column, I caveated there are other narrow categories of murder that qualify for first-degree treatment, but I didn’t go into them because they didn’t seem relevant. Turns out, though, that Bragg has decided one of them — murder in furtherance of an act of terrorism (Section 125.27(1)(a)(xiii) of the state penal law) — is germane.

Having done my share of prosecuting terrorists, I think this is a reach. I imagine the SDNY thinks so, too — unlike the DA’s office, the SDNY has a long history of terrorism prosecutions, yet it charged Mangione with murder, not terrorism, in the complaint it filed yesterday.

Terrorists coerce civilian populations and governments by the threat of mass killing and other continuing sprees of violence. It does not diminish the heinousness of Brian Thompson’s murder to observe that it would trivialize the unique horror of terrorism to apply it to a single act of murder. Mafia “families” commit violent acts to intimidate civilian populations; should we now think of them as terrorist organizations?

This is the familiar Bragg pattern: Turn a blind eye to much of the street crime that affects the day-to-day lives of New Yorkers, but jump in and over-charge the headline-grabbing cases: Accuse Penny of wanton homicide in a justification case in which he exhibited heroism to protect passengers and completely cooperated with police; turn what was at most a trivial, time-barred misdemeanor against Trump into 34 felonies.

Not surprisingly, the New York indictment includes the more conventional charges one would expect in a premeditated murder case — second-degree murder and gun offenses. This would give a jury something to fall back on when the sensational terrorism counts are either thrown out pretrial or result in acquittals. More on that in a moment.

I pointed out last week that a federal homicide charge would have to rely on interstate commerce for jurisdictional purposes. I suggested that the so-called Travel Act might do the trick. The SDNY has found a better charge — interstate stalking with intent to kill (under Section 2261A(1)(A) of the federal penal code), which is punishable (under Section 2261(b)(1)) by life imprisonment. Even more gravely, the government accuses Mangione of using a firearm to commit murder in relation to the stalking crime, the penalty for which is death or life imprisonment (under Section 924(j)).

In all, there are four federal counts (two stalking and two firearms offenses). We should note that these charges were filed by a sworn complaint in order to arrest Mangione and commence criminal proceedings in federal court. The SDNY must obtain a grand jury indictment of Mangione on these and/or other charges before the case may proceed to the trial court.

The federal charges underscore the weakness of the state terrorism allegations.

Let’s start with state law. Under the New York penal code (Section 490.25), a person commits “a crime of terrorism” when

with intent to intimidate or coerce a civilian population, influence the policy of a unit of government by intimidation or coercion, or affect the conduct of a unit of government by murder, assassination or kidnapping, he or she commits a specified offense.

Mangione allegedly stalked and killed a single executive in the health insurance industry. Whatever intimidating effect he hoped to have on that industry, he obviously was not intimidating an entire civilian population, nor was he seeking to influence the policy or conduct of a unit of government.

Now, consider the federal complaint. In its press release, the Justice Department highlighted the allegation that “over the course of the last several months, MANGIONE meticulously planned the execution of Brian Thompson in an effort to initiate a public discussion about the healthcare industry” (emphasis added). There appears to be significant evidence for this proposition. Assuming it is true (and, of course, all of this would have to be proved in court), a desire to “initiate a public discussion” is not the intimidation or coercion of a civilian population, nor is it an attempt to coerce the state or federal government. That is to say, it’s not terrorism under New York law.

The state and federal prosecutors are cooperating. At a press conference yesterday, Edward Kim, the Biden-Harris DOJ’s acting U.S. attorney for the SDNY, said he expected that the state case would proceed first. That is likely because pretrial procedures in federal death penalty cases are extensive; they include, for example, an opportunity for the defense to try to persuade the DOJ not to proceed with any capital count.

As I’ve noted on other occasions, the Biden-Harris administration is Janus-faced on the matter of capital punishment, which is substantially approved of by the public but reviled by progressives. Thus did the Biden-Harris DOJ mount a successful defense on appeal of the death penalty sentence imposed on Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, and now it has filed a capital charge against Mangione. Yet, while it touts the death penalty in these cases for public consumption, the Biden-Harris administration also assures the Democrats’ progressive base that no one is actually being executed; there has been a moratorium on carrying out the death penalty since Biden took office in January 2021.

In Mangione’s case, decisions about the course of the prosecution, including the death penalty and the extent of cooperation with DA Bragg, will be made by the incoming Trump-Vance administration — in particular, Attorney General Pam Bondi and SDNY U.S. attorney Jay Clayton (assuming that they are both confirmed by the Senate). Trump favors the death penalty and, in his first term as president, ended a 17-year moratorium on the death penalty, executing 13 death-row inmates. (There are currently 40 convicts awaiting execution of death sentences.)

It remains to be seen how much the Trump-Vance DOJ will favor cooperation with DA Bragg.