Attorney General Pam Bondi has directed prosecutors to seek a death sentence for Luigi Mangione, the man accused of shooting dead UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in December.
Mangione, 26, is accused of carrying out the high-profile murder of Thompson in Manhattan late last year. “Luigi Mangione’s murder of Brian Thompson—an innocent man and father of two young children—was a premeditated, cold-blooded assassination that shocked America,” Bondi said in a statement.
“After careful consideration, I have directed federal prosecutors to seek the death penalty in this case as we carry out President Trump’s agenda to stop violent crime and Make America Safe Again.”
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The University of Pennsylvania graduate faces charges in Pennsylvania including possessing an unlicensed firearm, forgery, and providing false identification to police. The maximum punishment for these charges is life in prison.
Mangione is facing trial in New York first, however, on separate charges in both federal and state courts, including homicide and terrorism.
He has pleaded not guilty to state charges but is yet to enter a plea to federal charges. These charges carry the maximum penalty of capital punishment, which is what Bondi wants.
It is expected that Mangione’s two cases will run parallel, with state charges set to be tried first. However, it remains to be seen if Bondi’s announcement will change the order of the trials.
In a statement on Tuesday, the Department of Justice said that Thompson’s “murder was an act of political violence.”
“Mangione’s actions involved substantial planning and premeditation and because the murder took place in public with bystanders nearby, may have posed grave risk of death to additional persons,” the statement said.
He was arrested in a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania, five days after the 50-year-old businessman was gunned down.
On his first day back in office in January, President Trump signed away a Biden-era moratorium on federal executions. His macabre executive order compels the DOJ to seek the death penalty in federal cases where applicable.
Brad Sigmon, 67, a convicted double murderer, was executed by firing squad in South Carolina last month. It was the first execution by firing squad in the United States since 2010, and the first ever for South Carolina.
Eddie James was the last person executed in the U.S., according to Death Penalty Information Center. He died by lethal injection for the brutal 1993 murders of 58-year-old Elizabeth “Betty” Dick and her eight-year-old granddaughter.
His death followed a flurry of executions at the end of Trump’s first term. Breaking an 130-year-old precedent of pausing executions amid a presidential transition, Trump’s administration raced through five of them before Joe Biden got to the White House on January 20.
If it were to come to it, Mangione’s federal execution would cause mass public debate.
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who was found guilty of all 30 counts related to the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, was sentenced to death in 2015. The conviction marked the first time in the post-September 11 era in which a terrorist was handed a death sentence by a federal jury. He is still alive, however, with his case mired in accusations of juror bias.
Lisa Montgomery, the only woman on federal death row at the time, was put to death in January 2021. The 52-year-old was convicted of strangling Bobbie Jo Stinnett to death in 2004 and then cutting her baby out from her womb.
The death penalty is legal in 27 U.S. states and at federal level.
