It’s because of a quirk in homicide law in New York. It’s not an assessment of the heinousness of the crime.

Nothing in New York law is ever simple.

A number of commentators, friends, and family have asked me over the last couple of days why Luigi Mangione, the alleged killer of health-insurance executive Brian Thompson on a New York City street, is charged with second-degree murder. Given what appears to be overwhelming evidence that this was a brutal, intentional assassination, shouldn’t the charge be first-degree murder?

The answer involves not a judgment about the cold-blooded calculation on display but the confusing history of the death penalty in the United States — and in New York specifically, even though there hasn’t been an execution in the Empire State since convicted murderer Eddie Mays was electrocuted at Sing Sing Prison in 1963.

In a confounding 1972 ruling that produced nine opinions, the Supreme Court ruled in Furman v. Georgia that the manner in which the state imposed and carried out the death penalty was unconstitutional. It was unclear whether this decision heralded the end of capital punishment in the United States, notwithstanding its manifest constitutionality.

(Note: The death penalty is explicitly referred to in the Constitution, which provides that the government may deprive a person of life as long as there is due process of law. It would be absurd, moreover, to contend that the Eighth Amendment proscription against cruel and unusual punishments — made applicable to the states via the 14th Amendment — was originally understood to prohibit capital punishment, even if it might have much to say about the manner in which convicts were executed.)

For a number of years, some states tried to modify their laws to answer the sundry complaints raised in Furman. In 1976, in a number of cases grouped under the heading Gregg v. Georgia (1976), the Court chopped away at Furman, holding that if capital procedures were sufficiently clear and objective, and provided adequate guidance to juries, the death penalty did not violate the Eighth Amendment. The Court’s death-penalty jurisprudence continued to be erratic in the ensuing years. (Justice Scalia’s opinion for the Court in Stanford v. Kentucky [1989] is an edifying exception.)

Capital punishment is one of those issues that exposes a fissure in American society. The public supports it, elite opinion opposes it. (This is an oversimplification, of course, but it’s broadly accurate.) This has played out as such fissures customarily do in the law: legislatures enact death-penalty provisions and politicians campaign on using capital punishment to get tough on hardened criminals, while judges often push back and look for theories that would nullify capital punishment or at least prevent its imposition in particular cases.

That is what’s happened in the nearly half century since Gregg. States have tried to modify their laws to answer the various concerns raised by courts; and with the Supreme Court having grudgingly acknowledged that the federal Constitution permits capital punishment, state courts, particularly in blue states, have relied on state constitutions — “evolving” them as necessary to ban death sentences.

In New York, under the state’s last Republican governor, George Pataki, an effort was made in the mid 90s to overhaul New York’s homicide laws. The idea was to clarify and spotlight what the courts described as “aggravating circumstances” that would justify death sentences. First-degree murder was essentially limited to intentional killings of police officers and corrections officers killed in the line of duty. (There are other categories of killings that qualify, but they are narrow.) All other intentional murders were prosecutable under the second-degree murder statute.

This overhaul was for naught. In the 2004 case of People v. LaValle, the New York Court of Appeals (the state’s highest court) held that the statutory death penalty procedure enacted in 1995 violated the state constitution (purportedly because the jury instructions it required in cases of jury deadlock were “coercive” in favor of imposing death). Since LaValle, the state has not tried to amend its laws to permit capital punishment.

To be clear, then, the fact that Mangione is charged with second-degree murder does not reflect an assessment that the killing was not serious enough to qualify as first-degree murder. It is just a quirk in homicide law rooted in disputes over capital punishment — which is not imposed in New York and is irrelevant to Mangione’s case.