NEW YORK – U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi announced Tuesday that she has directed prosecutors to seek the death penalty for Luigi Mangione in the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, fulfilling the president’s campaign promise to vigorously pursue capital punishment.
It is the first time the Justice Department has sought to reinstate the death penalty since President Donald Trump took office in January with a promise to resume federal executions, which were halted under the previous administration.
“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,” Bondi tweeted. She described Thompson’s murder as “an act of political violence.”
Mangione, a 26-year-old Ivy League graduate from a prominent Maryland real estate family, faces federal and state murder charges after allegedly shooting Thompson, 50, outside a Manhattan hotel on December 4 as the executive arrived for UnitedHealthcare’s annual investor conference.
Karen Friedman Agnifilo, Mangione’s lawyer, said Tuesday that in seeking the death penalty, “the Justice Department has moved from the dysfunctional to the barbaric.”
Mangione “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,” Friedman Agnifilo said in a statement, promising to fight all charges against him.
The killing and subsequent five-day manhunt that led to Mangione’s arrest shook the business community, with some health insurers quickly transitioning to remote work or online shareholder meetings. It also galvanized health insurance critics, who have rallied around Mangione as a proxy for dissatisfaction with coverage denials and high medical bills.
Surveillance footage captured a masked gunman shooting Thompson from behind. Police say the words “delay,” “deny,” and “depose” were scrawled on the ammunition, echoing a phrase commonly used to describe insurer tactics for avoiding paying claims.
Mangione faces federal charges of murder with a firearm, which carries the possibility of the death penalty. State charges carry a maximum sentence of life in prison. Mangione has pleaded not guilty to a state indictment but has not yet been required to enter a plea on federal charges.
Prosecutors have stated that the two cases will proceed in parallel, with the state case expected to go to trial first. It was not immediately clear whether Bondi’s announcement would change the order.
Mangione was arrested on December 9 in Altoona, Pennsylvania, approximately 230 miles (370 kilometers) west of New York City, and flown to Manhattan by plane and helicopter.
Police said Mangione had a 9mm handgun similar to the one used in the shooting, as well as a notebook in which he allegedly 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 another from October that describes an intent to “wack” an insurance company CEO. UnitedHealthcare, the largest health insurer in the United States, has stated that Mangione was never a client.
According to AP correspondent Julie Walker, the death penalty is being considered for Luigi Mangione, a UnitedHealthcare killing suspect.
Mangione’s lawyer has stated that she will seek to suppress some of the evidence.
Former President Joe Biden’s Justice Department filed the federal case against Mangione, leaving it up to Trump and his administration to decide whether to seek the death penalty. Because the federal case has taken a back seat to the state case, federal prosecutors have yet to seek a grand jury indictment, which is required in capital cases.
At the end of his first term, Trump oversaw an unprecedented 13 executions and has been a vocal supporter of expanding the death penalty. On his first day back in office, Jan. 20, Trump signed an executive order directing the Justice Department to seek the death penalty in federal cases where applicable.
Bondi’s order comes just weeks after she lifted the Biden-era moratorium on federal executions.
Biden campaigned on a promise to work toward abolishing federal capital punishment, but he took no significant steps toward that goal. While Attorney General Merrick Garland halted federal executions in 2021, Biden’s Justice Department fought hard to keep death row inmates’ sentences in many cases.
In his final weeks in office, Biden commuted the sentences of 37 of the 40 people on federal death row, converting them to life in prison.
The three remaining inmates are Dylann Roof, who carried out the 2015 racist murders of nine Black members of Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina; Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the 2013 Boston Marathon bomber; and Robert Bowers, who fatally shot 11 congregants at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in 2018, the deadliest antisemitic attack in US history.
