MINNEAPOLIS, Min. \u2014 The suspect in the June assassination of Minnesota’s house speaker and her husband, and the attempted murder of a state senator and his wife, pleaded not guilty to numerous charges in federal court on Thursday, court papers say.<\/p>\n
Vance Luther Boelter, 58, of Green Isle, Minnesota, led police on a two-day manhunt after the June 14 shootings in New Hope, Minnesota. He appeared before U.S. Magistrate Judge Dulce Foster on Thursday and waived the reading of his six-count indictment, according to records for the U.S. District Court in Minnesota.<\/p>\n
He entered a plea of not guilty in the murders of Speaker Emerita Melissa Hortman and her husband, and the shooting of state Senator John Hoffman and his wife.<\/p>\n
Boelter’s attorney, Manny Atwal, could not immediately be reached for comment. There was no immediate statement from Acting U.S. Attorney for Minnesota, Joseph Thompson.<\/p>\n
Thompson in a previous statement said Boelter planned and carried out the targeted political assassinations “the likes of which have never been seen in Minnesota.”<\/p>\n
During the attacks at the homes of the two lawmakers, Boelter is accused of disguising himself as a police officer and wearing a silicone mask while driving an SUV with a license plate that simply read, “Police.”<\/p>\n
Two of the federal charges carry the possibility of the death penalty. Prosecutors have not made a decision whether to pursue a capital sentence, which would require the approval of U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi.<\/p>\n
Boelter also faces state charges including two counts of second-degree intentional murder and two counts of second-degree attempted intentional murder. Boelter’s state case has been paused as his federal proceedings continue.<\/p>\n
\n The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"MINNEAPOLIS, Min. \u2014 The suspect in the June assassination of Minnesota’s house speaker and her husband, and the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":67412,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[23,1302,3811,3071,3812,134,9746,3729,3,111,3813,3814,99,1505,2987,21,19,22,20,25,24,3324,2986],"class_list":["post-67411","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-states","tag-america","tag-cars","tag-classifieds","tag-crime","tag-homes","tag-jobs","tag-law","tag-local","tag-news","tag-politics","tag-radio","tag-salt-lake","tag-sports","tag-television","tag-traffic","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-usa","tag-utah","tag-weather"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67411","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=67411"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67411\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/67412"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=67411"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=67411"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=67411"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}