Who is Luigi Mangione’s judge

• Luigi Mangione’s New York judge is Gregory Carro, described as tough on crime and sympathetic to victims.
• Lawyers call him pragmatic, and some say he favors prosecution.
• Carro has allowed video and photography into his courtroom in previous high-profile proceedings.

His affairs earned him nicknames in the tabloids, including “rapist cops,” “killer nanny” and “blowtorch husband.” In 2021, he presided over the death of Lisa Banes, Gone Girl actress.

Gregory Carro, Justice of the Supreme Court of New York had dozens of sensational – sometimes gruesome – cases during his 25 years on the Manhattan criminal bench.

Starting Thursday afternoon, Carro will preside over his most high-profile case to date, the prosecution of Luigi Mangione, who is accused of the ambush shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.

With Carro on the bench in a likely crowded 13th floor courtroom, Mangione, 26, will be formally informed of the indictment for first degree murder against him. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg announced Tuesday that the indictment sets out a major charge of murder, considered an act of terrorism.

Once the charges are read, Mangione will have the opportunity to plead not guilty. Carro, who is expected to keep the case, will then set a future court date and order that Mangione be taken to a city jail pending that date.

A former Manhattan narcotics and homicide prosecutor, Carro was appointed to Manhattan Criminal Court in 1998.Mayor Rudy Giuliani.

Carro is the son of a retiree Associate Justice John Carrowho, in 1979, was the first Puerto Rican appointed an appeals judge in New York.

A “difficult draw”

The younger Carro is known among Manhattan Criminal Court defense attorneys as a “tough draw.”

If one lawyer says to another in a courthouse hallway, “I just found out my guy is going to be in front of Carro,” another might commiserate, “Wow, that’s a tough draw,” Senior city lawyers told BI.

Prosecutors could say the opposite of Carro: “Good draw.”

“Of course, in a case like this, there are no good judges,” said Ron Kuby, a longtime Manhattan lawyer. “You won’t find any Antifa members on the bench.”

Kuby called Carro “tough but not crazy,” as Manhattan criminal judges say.

Five Manhattan defense attorneys interviewed by Business Insider said the judge favored prosecution. No one would say this officially, because they might have cases before him in the future.

The most common descriptor among lawyers achieved by BI? “No nonsense.”

“He’s a tough judge,” said a former fellow jurist, Charles Solomon, a state Supreme Court justice in Manhattan who retired in 2017.

“Very firm, very fair and very respected by his colleagues,” Solomon said of Carro.

Judges are randomly assigned

Solomon said Carro would have been appointed as Mangione’s judge through a strictly random process.

What probably happened was that on December 4, the day of the Thompson shooting, Mangione’s lead prosecutor, Joel Seidemannhappened to be on call to “catch” new homicides.

Seidemann’s team of prosecutors transfers all of its new cases to one of only two assigned courtrooms, and one of them was Carro’s.

“It’s the typical way a case is assigned,” agreed another retired state Supreme Court justice, Michael Obus, who served as a supervising judge in Manhattan Criminal Court from 2009 to 2017.

“He’s a solid guy,” Obus said. “He’s a very good trial judge. In general, lawyers could do a lot worse than Judge Carro.”

Law, order and victims

During sentencing, Carro is a staunch defender of law, order and victims, as his numerous press clippings show.

“I can only imagine what memories haunt the victim in this case and his loved one,” he said last year during a recent high-profile sentencing for the attempted random, stabbing murder from a French tourist.

In 2011, Carro presided over the trial of an NYPD officer accused of raping a young fashion executive – a woman he had been assigned to help when she was too drunk to go out. from his taxi.

A jury cleared the officer of rape and found him guilty of official misconduct for the three filmed visits he made to the woman’s apartment during his shift that night.

Police violations “are tearing at the fabric that binds us all together,” Carro told former officer Kenneth Moreno, before sentencing him to a year in prison at Rikers Island Prison.

“You, sir, have burned a gaping hole in this fabric by committing these crimes.”

This is the most important media story regarding Carro so far.

Moreno’s attorney, Joe Tacopina, was one of the attorneys to call Carro “nonsense.”

“It’s not easy for the accused or the defense attorneys,” Tacopina said.

“Honestly, it doesn’t matter which judge is assigned to this case,” added President-elect Donald Trump’s former criminal lawyer. “There is overwhelming evidence of guilt here. It’s not about ‘Who did this?’ It’s about whether he was sane when he did it.”

In his highest-profile murder – dubbed the “killer nanny” case by the city tabloids – Carro allowed a jury to hear the insanity defense of Yoselyn Ortega, who in 2012 fatally stabbed two young children in her care.

Defense attorneys called two psychiatrists to the stand to testify that Ortega heard voices — including those of Satan — urging her to kill the children. Jurors also learned that when the mother returned home to witness the carnage in her Upper West Side bathroom, Ortega was nearby, slitting her throat with the murder weapon.

The jury rejected the defense.

Carro called Ortega “pure evil” during his 2018 sentencing.

He then sentenced Ortega to life without the possibility of parole for first-degree murder, the same maximum sentence Mangione faces for the same primary charge in his indictment.

Last month, the New York Times reported that Carro sentenced a Long Island, New York, man to 10 years in prison who admitted to planning to “shoot up a synagogue.” possession of a weapon constitutes a terrorism crime.