Predictive betting website Polymarket is offering odds on the future of homicide suspect Luigi Mangione.
Mangione was arrested in Altoona, Pennsylvania, on Monday morning, five days after UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was fatally shot in New York City. He is being held without bail on gun and forgery charges in Pennsylvania and is currently fighting extradition to New York, where he faces murder charges for Thompson’s death.
Polymarket users have responded to the news by placing bets on Mangione’s next moves, including whether or not the suspect will plead guilty and when he might be extradited to New York. More than a dozen Mangione-based bets had a trading volume of over $700,000 as of Wednesday evening.
Odds on the site, which are determined by bets placed on an outcome instead of outside factors, suggest that bettors expect Mangione to plead not guilty and to avoid extradition until the new year. At the time of publication, the suspect was shown with a 33 percent chance of entering a guilty plea and a 23 percent chance of being extradited to New York before 2025.
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Several long shot bets related to Mangione were also available on the site, including a 2 percent chance of the suspect posting to his verified account on X, formerly Twitter, by Friday and a 1 percent chance that a YouTube account purporting to belong to Mangione is found to be genuine.
Other bets offered by Polymarket include whether police will officially announce that Mangione used a 3D printer to make the “ghost gun” he allegedly possessed at the time of his arrest (currently a 98 percent chance) and whether it will be determined that Mangione acted alone (96 percent chance).
Newsweek reached out for comment to the office of Mangione’s lawyer Thomas Dickey via email on Wednesday night.
Dickey told reporters following an extradition hearing on Tuesday that Mangione would be pleading not guilty to at least the charges in Pennsylvania, while adding that he had not seen “any evidence” linking his client to Thompson’s death.
“If you’re an American and you believe in the American criminal justice system, you have to presume him to be innocent,” Dickey said.
New York City Police Department Commissioner Jessica Tisch said during a press conference on Wednesday that investigators were “able to match” Mangione’s fingerprints to prints found on a water bottle and a protein bar wrapper near the crime scene.
Shell casings found at the site of Thompson’s killing were also forensically matched to the ghost gun that Mangione was allegedly carrying on Monday, according to police.
Lawyer and legal analyst Mercedes Colwin said during a CNN appearance on Tuesday that the evidence against Mangione was “very problematic” for his defense and would be “very difficult” to overcome.
