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Trump admin tells NYC prosecutors to seek death penalty for Luigi Mangione
By
Samantha Max
Published Apr 1, 2025
Modified Apr 2, 2025
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Photo by Curtis Means-Pool/Getty Images
By
Samantha Max
Published Apr 1, 2025
Modified Apr 2, 2025
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Luigi Mangione could face the most serious punishment of all if he’s convicted.
Attorney General Pam Bondi directed prosecutors in New York City on Tuesday to seek the death penalty against the 26-year-old Ivy league graduate, who has been both condemned and celebrated for allegedly shooting an insurance executive.
Mangione was charged in federal court with stalking and killing United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson outside a Midtown hotel in December. He also faces various state charges, including first-degree murder in furtherance of terrorism, which carries a maximum sentence of life in prison.
In a statement, Bondi said the directive follows President Donald Trump’s “agenda to stop violent crime and Make America Safe Again.”
“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,” she said.
The death penalty is no longer an option in New York state courts. But it is still allowed under federal law. Bondi issued a memorandum earlier this year announcing the Department of Justice’s plans to seek death sentences more often and to lift a moratorium on federal executions.
President Donald Trump has repeatedly expressed his support for capital punishment and asked Congress to pass a bill that would make it mandatory for people who kill police officers. Decades before he was president, he took out a full-page ad calling for the death penalty against the Central Park Five and has refused to walk back his past statements since they were exonerated.
During Trump’s first administration, 13 federal prisoners were executed.
Mangione's attorney, Karen Friedman Agnifilo, called the Justice Department’s decision “barbaric.”
“While claiming to protect against murder, the federal government moves to commit the pre-meditated, state-sponsored murder of Luigi,” she said in a statement, adding, “Luigi is caught in a high-stakes game of tug-of-war between state and federal prosecutors, except the trophy is a young man’s life.”
A spokesperson for the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York declined to comment.
Prosecutors said Mangione traveled to New York City to kill Thompson while he was in town for an investor conference. In the early morning hours of Dec. 4, surveillance video showed a man wearing a hoodie approaching Thompson from behind and shooting him in the leg and back, according to a criminal complaint.
The shooter then fled, launching a multi-day search that ended with Mangione’s arrest in Altoona, Pa. Law enforcement found a notebook with entries that “express hostility towards the health insurance industry” and describe a plan to “wack” the CEO of an insurance company, the complaint said.
Mangione has become a folk hero for people who are disillusioned with the American health insurance industry — and for admirers of his looks and fashion. But Agnifilo, his defense attorney, accused law enforcement and elected officials of treating Mangione like “political fodder.”
Experts said most administrations would not have chosen to seek the death penalty in this type of case, especially given the public sympathy for the defendant.
Bernard Harcourt, a death penalty attorney and professor at Columbia Law School, said it would be an “uphill battle” for prosecutors to convince a jury in Manhattan to give Mangione a death sentence. But, he said, he wasn’t surprised the Trump administration would pursue capital punishment in this case because it aligns with his ideological agenda.
“It was an attack on the insurance industry, on a CEO,” Harcourt said. “It was an attack, in a way, on the capitalist system.”
During Trump’s first term, federal prosecutors sought the death penalty against Sayfullo Saipov, a self-professed ISIS supporter who was convicted of driving down the West Side Highway bike path in 2017, killing eight people. The jury in that case chose to sentence him to life in prison.
James Liebman, another Columbia Law School professor who litigates death penalty cases, said Saipov had a “more classic case for pursuit of the death penalty” and still did not result in capital punishment. He said prosecutors have generally become more reluctant to ask for the death penalty over the years because the process is costly and complex.
Liebman said he expects the Trump administration to seek the death penalty in a broader range of cases, especially after former President Joe Biden commuted the death sentences to life imprisonment for all but three people on federal death row in the final weeks of his presidency
“One of the things the administration is going to have to decide is whether it’s prepared to bring a lot of death penalty cases that it ends up losing at trial,” Liebman said.
Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly reported Luigi Mangione’s plea to federal charges. He has not entered one.
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public safety
Samantha Max
Samantha reports on whether New Yorkers feel safe and whether the institutions that are supposed to protect them are working. Before coming to WNYC/Gothamist, she spent three years covering the criminal justice system in Tennessee for Nashville Public Radio. Her reporting on Nashville's police department received multiple awards, including the Daniel Schorr Journalism Prize. Samantha was also part of the inaugural class of Report for America, a service journalism program that sends up-and-coming reporters to local newsrooms across the country. She is a Northwestern University grad, a Baltimore native and fluent in Spanish. Got a tip? Email [email protected] or Signal: samanthamaxwnyc.93.
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