Few murders, even horrific, shocking murders, are acts of terrorism. That doesn’t make them any less serious.

If you’ve followed the Luigi Mangione case here at NR, you are not surprised that a New York state court has now thrown out the terrorism murder charges. Back in December, I warned that this was likely to happen — not because the cold-blooded murder of United Healthcare executive Brian Thompson wasn’t horrifying, but because it wasn’t terrorism, a term and category of crime that has a specific legal meaning.

Judge Gregory Carro, who tossed the terrorism murder charges (but not other murder charges) explained:

While the defendant was clearly expressing an animus toward UHC, and the health care industry generally, it does not follow that his goal was to “intimidate and coerce a civilian population,” and indeed, there was no evidence presented [to the grand jury] of such a goal.

To repeat what I said back in December:

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.

I also pointed out that the murder charges brought by the federal government (which did not charge Mangione with a terrorism murder crime) underscored the weakness of the state terrorism charges:

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. [Emphasis added.]

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 homicide evidence against Mangione appears overwhelming. I expect him to be convicted in the federal and state cases. The state court ruling today simply affirms that not all — indeed, not many — heinous murder cases are terrorism cases. That incontestable fact hardly diminishes that seriousness of the murder charges.