Attorney General Pam Bondi on Tuesday directed federal prosecutors to seek the death penalty against Luigi Mangione , the accused killer of a UnitedHealth executive, calling the slaying a “premeditated, cold-blooded assassination that shocked America.”
“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,” Bondi said.
Mangione, 26 years old, faces state and federal charges in the murder of UnitedHealthcare Chief Executive Brian Thompson last year. Prosecutors have accused Mangione of waiting outside a Midtown Manhattan hotel where the executive was set to attend an investor meeting. Mangione shot Thompson with a 3D-printed ghost gun, prosecutors said, then fled the scene on an e-bike. Following a nearly weeklong manhunt, he was arrested after being spotted at a McDonald’s in Pennsylvania.
Federal prosecutors in December charged Mangione with offenses including using a firearm to commit murder, which made him eligible for the death penalty if convicted. The New York state case against Mangione is expected to proceed to trial before the federal one.
A lawyer for Mangione accused the Justice Department of being motivated by politics. “While claiming to protect against murder, the federal government moves to commit the pre-meditated, state-sponsored murder of Luigi,” defense attorney Karen Friedman Agnifilo said. “By doing this, they are defending the broken, immoral, and murderous healthcare industry that continues to terrorize the American people.”
A spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York, which brought the federal charges, declined to comment.
After taking the helm at the Justice Department as attorney general, Bondi pledged to revive the death penalty and lift a federal moratorium on capital punishment ordered under the Biden administration in 2021. The first Trump administration had reactivated the federal death penalty after a 17-year hiatus and put 13 inmates to death in its final months.
In his final weeks in the White House, former President Joe Biden commuted the sentences of 37 death row inmates , reducing their punishments to life imprisonment without parole. The move prevented Trump from executing most men on federal death row.
But it left in place the death sentences for three people found guilty of terrorism or hate-motivated mass killings: Dzhokhar Tsarnaev , who with his now-dead brother bombed the 2013 Boston Marathon , killing three and wounding more than 250 others; Robert Bowers , who killed 11 people in the 2018 attack on the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh; and Dylann Roof , who in 2015 killed nine at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C.
In a memo laying out her priorities as she took office earlier this year, Bondi excoriated the commutations and said they “severely undermined the rule of law and grievously damaged the public’s trust in the justice system.”
Mangione has pleaded not guilty to the state murder charges. He could face life in prison—but not the death penalty—if convicted of the state charges.
He is currently being held at the Metropolitan Detention Center, a federal jail in Brooklyn, N.Y. During a state court hearing earlier this year, his lawyers argued that they hadn’t received the evidence they needed to sufficiently represent him, and said they had inadequate access to their client.
Even if prosecutors ultimately seek the death penalty at trial, a jury would have to approve its use. During a 2023 death-penalty trial in New York, jurors convicted Manhattan bicycle-path terrorist Sayfullo Saipov but couldn’t agree on whether to sentence him to death . Saipov was sentenced to life in prison.
Write to Corinne Ramey at corinne.ramey@wsj.com and C. Ryan Barber at ryan.barber@wsj.com
