While running for president in 2016, then-candidate Donald Trump once famously boasted, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK? It’s, like, incredible.” What’s incredible is that neither Trump in his hypothetical nor Luigi Mangione, the confessed killer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, could be charged with first-degree murder under either federal or New York State law.

Instead, Mangione pleaded guilty to two federal interstate stalking charges resulting in death. The other two federal counts of actually using a firearm to cause death were dismissed by the federal judge earlier this year because, according to her interpretation of the law, which she admitted may seem “tortured and strange,” the underlying stalking conduct did not constitute “crimes of violence” that were the necessary predicate for the murder charges that carried the death penalty. Prosecutors, unfortunately, did not appeal that decision.