


WASHINGTON >> U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi said Tuesday that she would seek the death penalty for Luigi Mangione, who was charged with murdering the president of UnitedHealthcare in New York last year, part of a push to revive the widespread use of capital punishment in federal cases.
Bondi said her decision came after “careful consideration” and was in line with President Donald Trump’s executive order directing the Justice Department to renew death penalty requests after President Joe Biden in 2021 declared a moratorium on capital punishment for most federal offenders.
The move, which was widely anticipated, represented the intersection of Trump’s eagerness to impose the death penalty with a headline-grabbing murder case — the brazen public killing of Brian Thompson, a 50-year-old health care executive from Maple Grove allegedly targeted because Mangione saw him as a symbol of callous corporate greed, according to prosecutors.
“Luigi Mangione’s murder of Brian Thompson — an innocent man and father of two young children — was a premeditated, coldblooded assassination that shocked America,” Bondi said in a statement.
Bondi directed Matthew Podolsky, the acting U.S. attorney in Manhattan, to seek the death penalty. Nicholas Biase, a spokesperson for the office, which has been prosecuting Mangione’s federal case, declined to comment Tuesday.
In a statement, one of Mangione’s defense lawyers, Karen Friedman Agnifilo, said that seeking the death penalty in the case amounted to “premeditated, state-sponsored murder” intended to protect the “immoral” health care industry.
The decision “to execute Luigi” ran counter to “historical precedent,” she added.
Death penalty requests
It is not clear if the Justice Department, under Bondi, has requested the use of the death penalty since Trump took office in January, but the request in Mangione’s case is among the first.
The department is likely to announce other requests for the death penalty as they review cases where doing so would be appropriate, according to an official with knowledge of the situation.
Thirteen federal inmates were put to death during the final year of Trump’s first term after an informal 17-year freeze on the practice. In 2019, Attorney General William Barr announced the Trump administration’s intention to resume executions of federal death row inmates using a lethal injection of the drug pentobarbital. Legal challenges briefly blocked those efforts.
In an executive order issued on his first day in office, Trump directed the Justice Department to seek the death penalty for “crimes of a severity demanding its use,” without consideration of “other factors.”
The order included two examples that do not appear to directly correspond to the crimes Mangione is accused of committing: the murder of a law enforcement officer and a capital crime committed by an immigrant in the country illegally.
That is a reversal of the approach during the Biden administration, which limited death penalty requests to cases involving acts of terrorism and hate-motivated mass murder.
The case
Federal prosecutors in Manhattan filed murder charges against Mangione, a resident of Towson, Md., on Dec. 14, citing jurisdiction because he had crossed state lines to commit the crime. The complaint accused Mangione of traveling from Atlanta to the Port Authority Bus Terminal in New York, where he “meticulously” planned the shooting.
Investigators said Mangione had tracked Thompson’s movements and staked out his hotel in the days before the killing, after checking into a hostel on the Upper West Side using false identification.
The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office charged Mangione with first-degree murder later that month. He faces the possibility of life in prison without parole on the state charges.
Mangione, 26, an Ivy League graduate from a prominent Maryland real estate family, was arrested at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pa., five days after a hooded gunman fitting his description approached Thompson as he was heading into an early morning investors’ conference at the New York Hilton Midtown.
Surveillance video showed a masked gunman shooting Thompson from behind. Police say the words “delay,” “deny” and “depose” were scrawled on the ammunition, mimicking a phrase commonly used to describe insurer tactics to avoid paying claims.
The killing and ensuing five-day manhunt leading to Mangione’s arrest rattled the business community, with some health insurers hastily switching to remote work or online shareholder meetings. It also galvanized health insurance critics — some of whom have rallied around Mangione as a stand-in for frustrations over coverage denials and hefty medical bills.
Mangione has pleaded not guilty in both cases.
Police said Mangione had a 9mm handgun that matched the one used in the shooting and other items including a notebook in which they say he expressed hostility toward the health insurance industry and wealthy executives.
Among the entries, prosecutors said, was one from August 2024 that said “the target is insurance” because “it checks every box” and one from October that describes an intent to “wack” an insurance company CEO. UnitedHealthcare, based in Minnetonka, is the largest U.S. health insurer; it has said Mangione was never a client.
Mangione’s lawyer has said she would seek to suppress some of the evidence.
The federal criminal complaint against Mangione included one count of using a firearm to commit murder, which carried a maximum potential sentence of death, along with two stalking counts and a firearms offense.
What’s needed
Capital cases are rare in New York. The death penalty was effectively outlawed at the state level after a court ruling in 2004.
And the last federal execution in the state took place more than 70 years ago, when a bank robber who had murdered an FBI agent was executed.
To allow for the execution of Mangione, federal prosecutors would have to convince a group of jurors to vote unanimously for him to be put to death.
The task may be difficult, especially given the public support Mangione has received since the murder.
Last year, federal prosecutors said they would seek the death penalty against the gunman who killed 10 Black people in a racist massacre at a Buffalo, N.Y., supermarket in May 2022. The move was the first time that the Biden administration had sought the execution of a defendant.
In December, Biden commuted the sentences of 37 of the 40 people on federal death row. The decision spared the lives of prisoners convicted of killing law enforcement officials and committing murder during drug deals and bank robberies.
Three inmates were excluded: Dylann Roof, who murdered nine churchgoers in a racist killing spree in Charleston, S.C., a decade ago; Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the Boston Marathon bomber; and Robert Bowers, who killed 11 people at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in 2018, the deadliest antisemitic attack in the nation’s history.
“Capital punishment is an essential tool for deterring and punishing those who would commit the most heinous crimes and acts of lethal violence against American citizens,” Trump administration officials wrote in the executive order that the president signed.
“Yet for too long, politicians and judges who oppose capital punishment have defied and subverted the laws of our country.”
This report includes information from the Associated Press.