In December, Luigi Mangione was arrested for shooting health insurance executive Brian Thompson. Last week, Trump’s attorney general, Pam Bondi, announced that she was seeking the death penalty. It’s a highly unusual announcement, since Mangione hasn’t even been indicted yet on a federal level. (He has been indicted in Manhattan.) By intervening in this high-profile case, the Trump administration has made clear that it believes that CEOs are especially important people whose deaths need to be swiftly and mercilessly avenged.
The issue is that he’s only been indicted in New York, and New York abolished the death penalty more than twenty years ago.
The Feds would need to press their own charges if they wanted to pursue the death penalty, which they have not done yet. That’s the laughable part: they’re trying to dictate sentencing before they pressed charges, gathered evidence, or secured a conviction. And the only way to get a death sentence is by unanimous jury vote during sentencing, which, let’s be honest, is going to be very difficult to get rid Luigi.