Luigi Mangione speaks to his attorney, Jacob Kaplan, during a suppression of evidence hearing in the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in Manhattan Criminal Court on December 18, 2025 in New York City. (Luiz C. Ribeiro-Pool/Getty Images)
(NEW YORK) — Luigi Mangione asked a judge on Wednesday to postpone his federal trial from September 2026 to January 2027.
Mangione argued he could not properly prepare for his federal trial — which is set to begin with jury selection on Sept. 8 and opening statements on Oct. 13 — while he is on trial in the state case, which begins June 8.
The state trial would be ongoing while hundreds of potential jurors for the federal case begin filling out questionnaires on June 29.
“Mr. Mangione is now in the impossible position of having to review 800 jury questionnaires during the week of June 29, 2026, while on trial for second-degree murder in state court,” defense attorney Karen Friedman Agnifilo wrote in a letter to the judge. “As a practical matter, this would not be possible.”
She also argued potential jurors would be “bombarded” by news accounts of the state trial.
“As a result, forcing Mr. Mangione to start the state trial on June 8, 2026 — three weeks before potential federal jurors start filling out juror questionnaires a few blocks away in Mr. Mangione’s federal case — guarantees that the fairness and impartiality of Mr. Mangione’s federal jurors will be negatively impacted by weeks of media reporting,” the defense said.
Federal prosecutors are expected to oppose moving the trial date.
Mangione pleaded not guilty to state and federal charges after he was arrested for allegedly gunning down UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in Midtown Manhattan in December 2024.
In January, U.S. District Judge Margaret Garnett took the death penalty off the table in the federal case.
Matthew Perry attends the GQ Men of the Year Party 2022 at The West Hollywood EDITION on November 17, 2022 in West Hollywood, California. (Photo by Phillip Faraone/Getty Images for GQ)
(NEW YORK) — The woman reportedly known as the “Ketamine Queen” is set to be sentenced on Wednesday for providing the ketamine that killed Matthew Perry.
Jasveen Sangha admitted in a plea agreement to working with another dealer to provide the “Friends” actor with dozens of vials of ketamine, including the dose that led to his fatal overdose in October 2023 at the age of 54.
Sangha pleaded guilty last year to one count of maintaining a drug-involved premises, three counts of distribution of ketamine, and one count of distribution of ketamine resulting in death or serious bodily injury.
Sangha faces a maximum sentence of 65 years in prison. She is scheduled to be sentenced Wednesday morning local time in Los Angeles federal court.
Prosecutors said in court filings ahead of Sangha’s sentencing that she should serve 15 years in prison for her “cold callousness and disregard for life,” and that she’s shown little remorse, pointing to recorded jail communications in which, they say, Sangha talked about “obtaining ‘trademarks’ and securing book rights on the events of the case.”
In a sentencing memorandum filed last month, prosecutors said Sangha ran a “high-volume drug trafficking business out of her North Hollywood residence,” where she stored, packaged and distributed drugs, including ketamine and methamphetamine, since at least 2019. Prosecutors said Sangha continued to sell “dangerous drugs” even after learning she had sold ketamine that contributed to the overdose deaths of two men: Perry and, years earlier, Los Angeles resident Cody McLaury. McLaury died hours after Sangha sold him four vials of ketamine in 2019, prosecutors said.
“She didn’t care and kept selling,” prosecutors wrote. “Defendant’s actions show a cold callousness and disregard for life. She chose profits over people, and her actions have caused immense pain to the victims’ families and loved ones.”
Sangha “had the opportunity to stop after realizing the impact of her dealing – but simply chose not to,” which warrants a “significant” sentence, prosecutors also said.
The defense, meanwhile, said Sangha, who has been behind bars since her arrest in August 2024, should receive a sentence of time served due to her “demonstrated rehabilitation.”
“She has maintained sustained and exemplary sobriety, and actively engaged in recovery-oriented and rehabilitative programming while in custody, and has tremendously strong family and community support to facilitate successful reentry and reduce the risk of recidivism,” her attorneys, Mark Geragos and Alexandra Kazarian, wrote in a sentencing memorandum filed last month.
In response to the defense sentencing memorandum, prosecutors continued to argue that Sangha has shown a lack of remorse and claimed she has attempted to minimize the harm she’s caused.
“For example, defendant harmed two overdose victims, but her sentencing briefing does not even mention Cody McLaury and only references Matthew Perry in passing, in the context of defendant attempting to downplay her role in his death and to heap the blame on others,” prosecutors wrote in their response, filed last week.
They also argued that Sangha “expressed a similar lack of remorse in recorded jail communications” – including one on Dec. 25, 2024, during which prosecutors said an individual stated, “We’re gonna sell those book rights,” and Sangha allegedly responded, “Oh I know, the plan is in, the f—— trademark is going down,” according to the filing.
“Even if said in jest, this conversation suggests defendant does not appreciate the severity of her offenses, and instead sees her crimes as a potential future revenue stream,” prosecutors wrote. “It also shows that time in custody has, thus far, failed in getting defendant to adequately reflect upon the grave harms she has caused.”
Geragos has previously said that Sangha “feels horrible.”
“She’s felt horrible from day one,” Geragos told reporters outside the courthouse last year following Sangha’s guilty plea. “This has been a horrendous experience.”
In a victim impact statement filed ahead of the sentencing, Perry’s stepmother, Debbie Perry, said the pain caused by the defendant is “irreversible.”
“Please give this heartless woman the maximum prison sentence so she won’t be able to hurt other families like ours,” she wrote.
In addition to Sangha, four other people were charged and pleaded guilty in connection with Perry’s death: the other dealer, Erik Fleming; Kenneth Iwamasa, Perry’s live-in personal assistant; and two doctors, Mark Chavez and Salvador Plasencia.
Prosecutors said Sangha worked with Fleming to distribute ketamine to Perry, and that in October 2023, they sold the actor 51 vials of ketamine that were provided to Iwamasa.
“Leading up to Perry’s death, Iwamasa repeatedly injected Perry with the ketamine that Sangha supplied to Fleming,” the DOJ said in a press release last year. “Specifically, on October 28, 2023, Iwamasa injected Perry with at least three shots of Sangha’s ketamine, which caused Perry’s death.”
Iwamasa pleaded guilty in August 2024 to one count of conspiracy to distribute ketamine causing death and is scheduled to be sentenced on April 22.
Fleming pleaded guilty in August 2024 to one count of conspiracy to distribute ketamine and one count of distribution of ketamine resulting in death and is set to be sentenced on April 29.
Chavez and Plasencia have also been convicted for their roles in what prosecutors called a conspiracy to illegally distribute ketamine to Perry.
Chavez, who once ran a ketamine clinic, pleaded guilty in October 2024 to one count of conspiracy to distribute ketamine and was sentenced to eight months home confinement in December 2025.
Plasencia, who briefly treated Perry prior to the actor’s death, pleaded guilty in July 2025 to four counts of distribution of ketamine and was sentenced to 30 months in prison in December 2025.
(NEW YORK) — This year began with a deadly New Year’s Day car-ramming terrorist attack in New Orleans and is finishing with a flurry of horrific shootings, including a mass shooting at Brown University, but 2025 is also poised to end with the largest one-year drop in U.S. homicides ever recorded, according to data from cities both large and small.
Based on a sampling of preliminary crime statistics from 550 U.S. law enforcement agencies, the year is expected to end with a roughly 20% decrease in homicides nationwide, Jeff Asher, a national crime analyst, told ABC News.
“So, even taking a conservative view, let’s say its 17% or 16%, you’re still looking at the largest one-year drop ever recorded in 2025,” said Asher, co-founder of AH Datalytics and a former crime analyst for the CIA and the New Orleans Police Department.
Experts say crime levels appear “back to normal” after a pandemic surge.
The dramatic drop in homicides surpasses a 15% decline in 2024, which was then the largest decrease on record, according to Asher. In 2023, the number of homicides across the country fell 13% and 6% in 2022, according to the FBI.
The number of homicides nationwide is expected to be the lowest since the FBI began keeping such records in 1960, Asher said.
Asher said his assessment is based on the Real-Time Crime Index, which he founded and is a collection of monthly crime data from 550 law enforcement agencies nationwide.
The FBI’s official annual report on crime isn’t expected to be released until the second quarter of 2026, leaving Asher and other experts to rely on preliminary data from a sampling of law enforcement agencies.
Preliminary data the FBI made public earlier this year showed that homicides across the country fell 18% between September 2024 and August 2025. The FBI data also showed an overall 9% decline in violent crime during the same time period and a 12% reduction in property crime.
“You’ve got places like Detroit, Philadelphia and Baltimore that are on track to have the fewest murders since the 1960s. New Orleans, in spite of the terrorist attack on January 1, is on pace to have the fewest murders since 1970,” Asher said. “San Francisco is on track to see the fewest number of murders since 1940.”
Homicides in Chicago are down 30% this year from 2024, according to crime statistics from the Chicago Police Department (CPD). The number of homicides this year is down 49% since 2021, when the city recorded nearly 800 homicides, the CPD data shows.
And it’s not just homicides that are plummeting to record lows in 2025, according to Asher.
“We’re seeing across-the-board drops in every type of reported crime, which happened in 2024 and we’re seeing again in 2025,” said Asher, adding that aggravated assaults across the country are down 8% this year and motor vehicle theft has fallen 23%.
My son was innocent Despite the plunge in violent crime this year, the perception for some is that crime was rampant at certain points in a number of major cities.
The falling homicide numbers offered little solace to Tamara Tarpinian-Jachym, whose 21-year-old son, Eric Tarpinian-Jachym, was killed on June 30 when he was caught in the crossfire of a shooting in Washington, D.C., less than a mile from the White House.
“You can skew data any way you want,” Tarpinian-Jachym of Massachusetts told ABC News. “I believe that there’s more crime, violent crime, especially in our major cities.”
Three teenagers, including two brothers, were arrested on murder charges and are being prosecuted as adults in federal court in the death of Tarpinian-Jachym’s son, a University of Massachusetts student who, at the time he was killed, was a Congressional intern for Rep. Ron Estes, R-Kan. One of the suspects charged in his death was also charged in a separate homicide of a 17-year-old girl in Washington, D.C.
All three defendants charged in Tarpinian-Jachym’s homicide have pleaded not guilty.
“My son was innocent. Others were innocent victims of this crime. If more people died, it would have been a mass shooting. But my son was the only one who died,” Tarpinian-Jachym said.
Citing her own experience, Tarpinian-Jachym said blanket homicide statistics don’t take into account the suffering of family members like her left to grieve.
“It tears the family apart. You never have inner peace,” Tarpinian-Jachym said. “My heart goes out to all murder victims this year.”
Tarpinian-Jachym told ABC News that she agreed with President Donald Trump’s decision in August to deploy National Guard troops to Washington, D.C., and several other large cities to help combat crime. The decision followed a May 21 shooting at the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C., that killed two staff members of the Israeli Embassy and came even as crime was already down, according to the Metropolitan Police Department of the District of Columbia (MPD) preliminary crime data posted online.
Homicides in Washington, D.C., as of Dec. 30, are down 31% compared to 2024, according to the MPD’s online data.
However, a lawsuit filed against the District of Columbia in 2020 by a former MPD sergeant-turned-whistleblower claimed the MPD routinely “misclassified crimes and that districts compete against each other to get the largest reduction in the crime statistics.” The lawsuit was settled out of court this past August. According to court documents, the District of Columbia agreed to dismiss the case “without any admission of any liability.”
On Dec. 14, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform released an interim staff report alleging that its investigation found MPD Chief Pamela A. Smith, who announced this month that she is stepping down, “pressured and at times directed commanders to manipulate crime data in order to maintain the appearance of low crime in the nation’s capital.”
In a Dec. 15 interview with NBC Washington, D.C., station WRC-TV, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser responded, saying, “I don’t see any evidence of that.”
Mass shootings drop in 2025 According to the Gun Violence Archive, a website that tracks shootings across the country, this year is poised to end with mass shootings down 22% from the 503 committed in 2024. The website defines a mass shooting as at least four victims shot, either injured or killed, not including the shooter.
Among the nearly 400 mass shootings across the country this year, two of the most devastating occurred at churches.
On Aug. 27, two children, ages 8 and 10, were killed and 21 people were injured at Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis when a 23-year-old shooter opened fire through the windows of the school’s church during a service, police said. The suspect, Robin Westman, whose mother once worked at the church, died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, authorities said.
On Sept. 28, four people were killed and eight others were injured in a mass shooting at a Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints chapel in Grand Blanc, Mich., according to the FBI. The suspect, 40-year-old Thomas Sanford of Burton, Mich., allegedly set fire to the chapel after crashing his truck into the building, authorities said.
Sanford, who served as a Marine sergeant and was deployed in Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2007, was killed in a shootout with police.
And on Dec. 13, a gunman opened fire in a lecture hall at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, killing two students and injuring nine others. Following a weeklong search, the suspect, Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, a 48-year-old former Brown graduate student, was found dead at a New Hampshire storage facility from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound, authorities said.
Neves Valente is also suspected of killing MIT professor Nuno F.G. Laureiro two days after the Brown University shooting, according to federal prosecutors.
‘I’m seeing now that we’re back to normal.’ Despite the string of high-profile killings and attacks this year, Robert Boyce, a retired chief of detectives for the New York Police Department, said the dramatic drop in 2025 homicides is real.
Boyce said that when he retired from the NYPD in 2018, the city had fewer than 300 homicides that year.
But when the COVID pandemic hit in 2020, homicides across the country soared 30%, according to the FBI.
“Courts were being shut down, and schools were being shut down. We couldn’t do our job in the police department like we did in previous years,” said Boyce, adding that the police-involved killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis also led to mistrust of law enforcement and prompted calls to defund police departments.
Homicides in New York City went from 317 in 2019 to 462 in 2020, a 44% increase, according to NYPD crime statistics. Homicides jumped another 4% in 2021 to 488.
During the pandemic, which wasn’t declared over until May 2023, homicides dramatically increased in other major cities.
Chicago recorded 769 homicides in 2020, which was 274 more than the previous year, and jumped to 797 in 2021, according to Chicago Police Department data.
Philadelphia saw a 40% increase in homicides in 2020 compared to 2019, according to Philadelphia Police Department data. In 2021, homicides continued to climb, hitting a record high of 562.
“We fought back. We completely redid our police department to be more narcotics-focused and increased our narcotics division. And we saw the gradual decreases,” Boyce said of the NYPD.
As of Dec. 28, homicides are down in New York City by 21% this year compared to 2024. Earlier this month, New York Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch announced that in the first 11 months of 2025, the nation’s largest city saw the fewest shooting incidents and shooting victims in recorded history.
Boyce said the NYPD and other law enforcement agencies also worked with federal prosecutors to target gang members, who Boyce said were a major driver of violent crime during the pandemic and continue to be now. The federal government also strengthened partnerships with local police agencies and provided grants to support programs to reduce violent crime.
“I’m seeing now that we’re back to normal. The reset is here. That’s great news,” Boyce said.
Asked if the country is back to pre-pandemic crime levels, Boyce said, “We’re just a little above and not much.”
Stephen Miller, deputy White House chief of staff for policy, walks on the South Lawn of the White House after arriving on Marine One in Washington, DC, US, on Tuesday, Jan. 27, 2026. US President Donald Trump threw his support behind a legislative proposal that would expand sales of higher-ethanol E15 gasoline as he looked to build support for his economic record with a crowd that included farmers in Iowa. (Kent Nishimura/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
(WASHINGTON) — Over the weekend, the former chief of staff of the Justice Department — who was one of Attorney General Pam Bondi’s top advisers during her first seven months on the job — issued a public call for lawyers who “support President Trump” to join the Justice Department’s ranks.
In a post on X, the former chief of staff, Chad Mizelle, seemed to suggest he could help such applicants become career federal prosecutors — who by law are supposed to be apolitical.
“DM me,” Mizelle wrote, referring to direct messages sent privately to him. “We need good prosecutors.”
Forty minutes later, one of President Donald Trump’s top policy advisers, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, reposted Mizelle’s message, adding, “Patriots needed.” And then on Monday, the current U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida, Jason Reding Quinones, also reposted Mizelle’s message, saying, “We are hiring!”
There are political appointees within the Justice Department, including certain leaders based in Washington and the U.S. attorneys who oversee offices around the country — but the assistant U.S. attorneys, or AUSAs, who investigate and prosecute cases in those offices are supposed to be nonpolitical and nonpartisan.
Appearing on a conservative podcast on Monday, Mizelle said he has received “hundreds and hundreds of inquiries already” from lawyers looking to become AUSAs. But his posting, and the subsequent promotion of it by current senior government officials, has roiled some former federal prosecutors on both sides of the political spectrum.
“We shouldn’t have a favorite politician in the Justice Department; we should have a favorite document, and that’s the Constitution,” former prosecutor Perry Carbone told ABC News.
Carbone, who spent more than three decades as a federal prosecutor and until May was the chief of the criminal division at the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, said that Mizelle’s post has “generated a lot of discussion” among former federal prosecutors, who are concerned about its implications.
“It’s dangerous,” he said of what the post could mean. “The day that Department of Justice lawyers are hired based on loyalty to a person … is the day the rest of us should get very nervous.”
He said the message in Mizelle’s post — and the reposts by Reding Quinones and Miller — “flatly contradict” federal laws and regulations pertaining to the hiring of career federal employees.
He cited federal laws, including the Civil Service Reform Act, that specifically prohibit favoring or discriminating against applicants for federal civil-service jobs based on their “political affiliation.”
“The law is very clear,” Carbone said.
He also cited the Justice Department’s own manual, which says, “All personnel decisions regarding career positions in the Department must be made without regard to the applicant’s or occupant’s partisan affiliation.”
“Efforts to influence personnel decisions concerning career positions on partisan grounds should be reported to the Deputy Attorney General,” the manual states.
Andy McCarthy, a conservative commentator and frequent Trump critic who himself served as a federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York for nearly two decades, also blasted Mizelle’s post.
“If support for [the current] president is now a condition of enforcing federal law, Congress should defund DOJ. DOJ should only exist if it’s nonpartisan. Too dangerous to liberty otherwise,” McCarthy wrote.
“If AG Garland’s office had posted this, MAGA & GOP would be calling for impeachment,” he added, referring to Merrick Garland, the Biden administration’s attorney general.
Appearing on former Trump adviser Steve Bannon’s podcast Monday, Mizelle defended his post, saying that Article II of the Constitution explicitly states that “all executive power shall be vested in a president of the United States,” so “any time an executive branch officer is using executive power — an AUSA indicting somebody or … bringing criminal evidence against somebody — all of that is executive power that’s included.”
Mizelle said that when he was working for Bondi last year, his “job as chief of staff” was to “root out a lot of this stuff,” so, “On Day 1 we dismissed about 100 people who we thought were working against Donald J. Trump,” and then “thousands” more left.
“That’s how government should work. It should work that if you can’t follow the wishes of the duly elected president of the United States, then you need to leave. And all we’re looking for now are people who want to follow his agenda,” Mizelle said.
But Carbone said he rejects Mizelle’s analysis of the Constitution and the work of federal prosecutors under changing administrations. While policies may change, prosecutors “have to exercise independent professional judgment, not political obedience,” he said.
That’s underscored by a 2008 report from the Justice Department’s inspector general, who launched an investigation at the time into allegations that the Justice Department under President George W. Bush had been improperly using political affiliations to screen candidates for an apolitical summer internship program and a program that hired recent law graduates without prior legal experience.
In his report, the inspector general noted that “both DOJ policy and civil service law prohibit discrimination in hiring for DOJ career positions on the basis of political affiliations,” and said courts have considered “political affiliation” to include “commonality of political purpose, partisan activity, and political support.”
After his office’s investigation, the inspector general concluded that two political appointees in the department “took political or ideological affiliations into account in deselecting candidates in violation of Department policy and federal law.”
As for Mizelle’s recent post, Carbone said it is “just another symptom” afflicting a Justice Department that “has been building this reputation of independence for 50 years, since Watergate, and now here we are in a place where we’ve taken a giant step back.”
Mark Rotert, an AUSA in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Chicago during the 1980s and 1990s, who was also on his office’s hiring committee, agreed, calling Mizelle’s post “disgraceful.”
“It never would have occurred to us to explore what the candidate’s views were about the president, or what kind of job the president is doing,” Rotert said of his time on the hiring committee. “Partisan politics were never considered a relevant or even an appropriate discussion point.”
Carbone also said that while Mizelle may not work at the Justice Department anymore, the boost it received from Miller, a senior White House official, and Reding Quinones, a U.S. attorney, shows how connected Mizelle still is — or at the least how his message “is supported by high-level people in the Justice Department.”
Mizelle’s post comes as the Justice Department faces increasing pressure over its handling of a wide array of politically charged matters, including firing prosecutors and investigators who were involved in previous Trump-related investigations; filing federal charges against or otherwise investigating many of President Trump’s political enemies; failing to initially investigate the officer who fatally shot Renee Good in Minneapolis last month; and most recently last week’s FBI seizure of ballots and other records related to the 2020 election from an elections office in Fulton County, Georgia.
A Justice Department spokesman did not respond to a message from ABC News seeking comment. The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida also did not respond to a message seeking comment from ABC News.
