A truck displays photos of Luigi Mangione on April 25, 2025 in New York because he was to appear for the indictment for having murdered the CEO of Unitedhealthcare last year.
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Spencer Platt / Getty images
Luigi Mangione, 26, appeared on Friday before the Federal Court for the first time after His indictment On the federal accusations of having killed the former CEO of Unitedhealthcare, Brian Thompson.
Federal prosecutors officially filed an opinion from the court to ask Thursday to request the death penalty. Mangione pleaded not guilty on Friday.
What is unusual in his case is that the American prosecutor Pam Bondi announced earlier this month that she already ordered federal prosecutors to request the execution of Mangione.
This is the first case of death penalty that the Ministry of Justice is linked to the first day of President Trump executive decree Restore the executions of people in the corridor of federal death and undertake to continue the death penalty for all serious crimes that require its use.
The Trump administration of the death penalty for Mangione marks a new development in the changing policy of capital punishment in the United States, which is in the process of seeing more than half a century.
“Luigi Mangione’s Murder of Brian Thompson-An Innocent Man and Father of Two Young Children-Was a Premeditated, Cold-Blooded That Shocked America. After careful considering, I have direct federal prosecutors to see the deat penalty in this case President Trump’s Agenda to Stop Violent Crime and Make America Safe Again, “Bondi Said in an statement.
Mangione lawyers asked a federal court to prevent federal prosecutors from asking for the death penalty. In the judicial archives filed on April 11, lawyers argued that the Bondi directive before his indictment and public statements were political and broke out the Protocol of the Ministry of Justice established on the death penalty.
“Because the Attorney General has chosen to proceed in this way, the rights of the regular procedure of Mr. Mangione have already been raped and the way in which the government acted prejudice to the Grand Jury and corrupted the process of the Grand Jury,” the lawyers wrote in the file.
They ask the court to prevent Bondi from making future public statements that could harm Mangione’s right to a fair trial.
Robin Maher, the executive director of Death Pinnalty Information Center, agreed that the announcement of Bondi – weeks before Mangione’s indictment on April 17 – was rare.
The reference to the realization of Trump’s agenda, “in combination with the unusual timing in this case, suggests that the death penalty is used here to achieve a kind of political objective,” said Maher in an interview.
The non -profit organization does not take a position on the death penalty, but criticizes the way in which punishment is applied in certain cases.
New York Federal Prosecutors did not respond to a request for comments on the collection of policy in the Mangione case.
In the legal files in response to the allegations of Mangione, the lawyers of the potential bias of the Grand Jury, the prosecutors declared that the Federal Court had the power to intervene in the procedure of the Grand Jury. The prosecutors for their part also argued that it was premature, before his indictment, that Mangione disputes the death penalty in his case.
Wordsaw of Death Pinalty Politics
Maher said that during the last half-century, political trends in the Supreme Court, Congress and Presidency contributed to radically different approaches to the federal death penalty.
The United States Supreme Court in 1972 in a historical case said the unconstitutional death penalty. The court decided that the states and the federal government imposed a capital sentence in an arbitrary and inconsistent manner which was racial and otherwise discriminatory. The judges judged that the lack of implementation standards was of cruel and unusual punishment.
Then, the pendulum again balanced and the anti-drug-anti-drug law against abuse in 1988 widened the federal death penalty for drug-related murders in the war of President Ronald Reagan’s war against drugs.
Based on this, the Congress promulgated the 1994 sentence on the penalty of 1994 or title VI of the violent law on crimes control and the police. He has increased the number of federal offenses eligible for the death penalty.
In 2001, Timothy McVeigh, Oklahoma City’s bomber, became the first federal death inmate executed in almost 40 years.
This law is still the law of the country. But different presidents have chosen to give it a variable weight.
Maher said over the next two decades, “the federal death penalty was strongly criticized and examined due to many concerns concerning the racial way of the way it was used.”
Vote GallupWho has followed the question since the 1940s, shows that 53% of Americans promote the death penalty for people found guilty of murder in October 2024.
Trump’s first administration executed 13 detainees from the disappearance of death in 2020 and 2021 – compared to the executions of three people in the corridor of Federal Death during the first mandate of President George W. Bush. There was no federal execution during the second mandate of Bush or during the Obama administration.
President Joe Biden imposed a moratorium on federal executions on the death of death. In the weeks preceding Trump’s second term, biden commissioned death sentences of 37 people in the corridor of federal death.
The three prisoners of the remaining federal death whose sorrows, Biden did not make a journey do not dispute all their affairs.
Press for more state executions
Trump’s decree can also affect executions from prisoners in the death corridor.
Trump ordered the Ministry of Justice to encourage state -of -the -art prosecutors and local prosecutors to bring state capital accusations for all capital crimes. The administration has also undertaken to help states where the death penalty is legal, such as South Carolina, guarantees a sufficient supply of drugs to make fatal injections.
David Pascoe, a lawyer for the first legal circuit of the state lowountry, welcomes the support of the federal government.
“In South Carolina, we spent more than a decade without even having executions because we simply did not have the drug to administer for execution,” he said in an interview.
South Carolina and other states had had trouble obtaining drugs for fatal injections, including bromide of thiopental and pancuronium, due to shortages.
Some opponents of the death penalty also criticized the pentobarbital as a single dose injection to be inhuman and cause unnecessary pain and suffering.
Pascoe was put pressure for a state law which gives prisoners of death the death option in dismissing the team to respond to the concerns of botched fatal injections and in the event of a drug shortage. The state legislature adopted the law in 2021. The State also authorizes execution by electrocution.
South Carolina executed three people in 2025. Pascoe continued the most recent case, that of Mikal Mahdi. Mahdi was executed by a dismissal team for killing police captain James Myers during a one -week criminal trip in 2004. He was also sentenced to life prison in North Carolina for the murder of the Christopher Boggs convenience store.
Pascoe says that it is difficult to say if the Trump administration encouraging more prosecution on the death penalty of the state will mean that prosecutors in its state will actually pursue more condemnations.
“But it will be much appreciated to facilitate justice in our cases, I know it,” said Pascoe.