Exclusive | Heres why Luigi Mangione might have shockingly scrapped his psych defense

He’s crazy — like a fox.Luigi Mangione, 28, may have scrapped his “psychiatric defense” for his state murder trial because the legal gambit could have come back to bite him, legal eagles told The Post on Friday.Lawyers for the accused killer may have gotten cold feet after just one day and made the sensational about-face because they thought the defense could kneecap his separate federal case, according to lawyers not tied to the case.

There also could be something in Mangione’s medical records that he and/or his lawyers did not want to surface at trial, or it could have been a sudden decision made by Mangione himself — because he doesn’t want to be labeled mental, the experts said.Either way, the sudden switch-up “certainly increases the likelihood that Mangione will testify at his own trial to talk about his hatred and bitterness toward the health-insurance industry,” said Ron Kuby, a prominent Big Apple lawyer who has defended psychiatric cases in the past.Here is more explanation of the three possible reasons for the shocking change in legal strategy:Mangione had planned to claim he was overtaken by an “extreme emotional disturbance” when he allegedly executed UnitedHealthcare CEO BrianThompson on a Midtown sidewalk in December 2024, the judge in his case revealed this week.But that mental-health defense — which could lower his prison time by knocking the charges down from murder to manslaughter — is only available in New York state and not federal court.That means that if the Maryland prep-school and Ivy League grad took the stand in state court and admitted to his guilt — claiming mental duress and landing a lesser sentence — he’d still have to face a federal trial, where his admission of guilt was already established and he wouldn’t have the mental-defect argument to fall back on to escape a harsh sentence.“He cannot testify to that, or he will buried in federal court — it would basically be a full confession,” said...