Hopefully they actually respect his legal rights to some degree and have borked the process enough for him to walk free. It may end up in a total dismissal of all the serious charges with only the possession of a fake ID and so on standing, though given how poorly they handled the evidence maybe not even that.
So far the judiciary has been the most effective bulwark against fascism in the USA. Terribly ineffective, but first prize nonetheless.
Judges don’t like the idea that other branches would have more power because that inherently means they are less important. They want their position to be important and meaningful so if the executive or legislative branch try to take over and ignore them they get pissed.
This has already started happening with the supreme court and some of the Trump executive orders. Some are being overturned, some are being massively narrowed, but few are just moving through without question.
Lots and lots of harm is locked in for the USA. Whether it ends in a full fascist dictatorship or not is still up in the air and one of the things that will decide that is what the judicial branch does. If they say nobody has any protection from law enforcement then they are saying they themselves have no protection.
The Trump administration has already had one judge arrested. More will come. This is where an inflection point will come. Does the judicial branch say no, enough, this is not OK? Or do they cave? In dearly hope the former.
To clarify, murder can be prosecuted at either a state or federal level.
First, from a state perspective, we are definitely dealing with a first degree murder charge. That would meet the requirements of willfull, deliberate, and premeditated murder. They will also likely be aiming for a finding of express malice, meaning they want to prove he had the frame of mind that he wanted to cause the harm as the primary end point, not just as a secondary part of doing something else like robbery or rape.
With regards to a federal charge, I will include the appropriate code.
18 U.S. Code § 1111 – Murder
(a)Murder is the unlawful killing of a human being with malice aforethought. Every murder perpetrated by poison, lying in wait, or any other kind of willful, deliberate, malicious, and premeditated killing; or committed in the perpetration of, or attempt to perpetrate, any arson, escape, murder, kidnapping, treason, espionage, sabotage, aggravated sexual abuse or sexual abuse, child abuse, burglary, or robbery; or perpetrated as part of a pattern or practice of assault or torture against a child or children; or perpetrated from a premeditated design unlawfully and maliciously to effect the death of any human being other than him who is killed, is murder in the first degree.
Any other murder is murder in the second degree.>
So from a federal perspective the same basic stuff applies. Did he do the act? Was it committed with express intent? If so, first degree. If not, second degree.
Under normal circumstances I do it believe this would merit a federal case, rather it should be a state case. Normally it is federal if it is an interstate hitman, a bank robbery, something that happened on a ship (because it is not in the land of a state), if the murder was drug related, if it was intended to influence a federal case outcome, if it was in the process of some fairly nasty child abuse cases, or if the person targeted was a federal officer or judge. As far as I can tell none of the above hold.
So one of the most important things here is that in both cases the prosecution has to show, with untainted and admissible evidence, the express intention to kill the CEO. This means if that evidence, his supposed manifesto, is not admissible due to failure to obtain a warrant, appropriate procedure for the execution of the search, and maintaining the chain of custody of the evidence, then it may not be admissible. He could completely skate on the first degree charges based purely on their incompetence at doing the search legally.
A second question is whether his initial arrest was valid. If they failed to maintain correct process in the actual arrest, failed to read his rights etc, failed to give him access to a lawyer on his request, that could taint the whole arrest.
The lawyer has already raised numerous issues with his arrest and the conduct after it. The leaking of the “manifesto” may have tainted the jury pool. The jokeresque pictures of Luigi in chains with 30 cops behind him may also have tainted the pool. The sheer amount of coverage may preclude an unbiased jury pool. Not to mention that the odds of finding 12 jurors plus however many alternates who have not been impacted by the USAs dismal healthcare system are pretty freaking slim. It could be a mistrial just from that.
This is a major clusterfuck from start to finish for the police and prosecutors. Nobody did this right, they took shortcuts and got carried away, and the media attention was so intense it could all just fall apart.
I can recommend trying shitty ones. I bought a couple of pairs of Temu and the clicky buttons are cheaper than capacitive touch, so I have two pairs that are easily pressed with gloved or in my case my shoulder when cooking or cleaning. They make a loudish click in my ear when I press the button, but it is not that bad.
A second and possibly worse option is to get wrap around earbuds, the kind that go behind the head. They tend to have buttons on the ear or just behind but still tend to be physical buttons most of the time.
I will bet nothing, but it is a good idea to make yourself more capable and informed at this time. Good time to learn how to grow food and raise chickens I think.