Luigi Mangione
Credit: International New York Times
Washington: Attorney General Pam Bondi said Tuesday that she would seek the death penalty for Luigi Mangione, who was charged with murdering a UnitedHealthcare executive in Manhattan 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 declared a moratorium on capital punishment for most federal offenders in 2021.
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 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 US 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.
Federal prosecutors in Manhattan filed murder charges against Mangione, a resident of Towson, Maryland, 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 those charges.
Mangione, 26, was arrested at a McDonald's in Altoona, Pennsylvania, 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.
He pleaded not guilty in both cases.