Attorney General Pam Bondi on Tuesday directed federal prosecutors to seek the death penalty for Luigi Mangione, the man accused of gunning down UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in New York City last year.
Mangione, 26, was federally charged in December with stalking and murdering Thompson after the CEO was fatally shot on the streets of midtown Manhattan. He was also charged with first-degree murder in furtherance of terrorism by state prosecutors.
Mangione has pleaded not guilty to all charges.
Bondi said that she was directing prosecutors to seek the death penalty as part of "President Trump’s agenda to stop violent crime and Make America Safe Again."
"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," the AG said in a statement.
The directive marks the first time the Justice Department will pursue the death penalty in Trump's second term.
Mangione's attorney called Bondi's directive "barbaric" and "political."
"This is a corrupt web of government dysfunction and one-upmanship," Karen Friedman Agnifilo said in a statement Tuesday. "Luigi 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."
Thompson’s family could not be reached for comment, and the Manhattan district attorney’s office declined to comment.
Mangione has yet to be indicted federally, and prosecutors have indicated that both sides are OK with delaying that process while state prosecutors bring their case first. If he is convicted of state charges, Mangione could be imprisoned for life without parole.
James S. Liebman, a professor at Columbia Law School who researches death penalty cases, said it was unusual for federal prosecutors to pursue the death penalty in states that do not issue capital punishment for state crimes. New York is one of the roughly two dozen states that does not have the death penalty.
"Jurors in those states can be less sympathetic to the death penalty, and prosecutors don’t like to bring capital cases and lose by not getting a capital sentence," he said "Once they’ve lost once or twice, they start getting less willing to bring those cases, and that’s been a big reason why the death penalty has dramatically decreased in its use in the United States over the last 25 years."
The last time federal prosecutors recommended the death penalty in New York was for Sayfullo Saipov, who drove a pickup into Manhattan's Hudson River Park in 2017, killing eight people. In 2023, a jury was unable to reach a unanimous decision to authorize the death penalty in that case. He was instead sentenced to life in prison without parole.
Late last year, the CEO's slaying and the subsequent manhunt for the masked gunman captured the nation's attention.
The shooter fled on a bike outside the New York Hilton Midtown, where Thompson was staying for his company's annual investors' meeting, police said. City security video showed the gunman riding into Central Park before disappearing.
Five days later, a worker at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania, said they recognized the gunman from images released by the New York Police Department and the FBI. Authorities arrested Mangione that day.
Police said they found Mangione with a ghost gun, multiple fake IDs and a three-page handwritten document "that speaks to both his motivation and mindset." Police later said that shells from the gun found on Mangione allegedly matched the shell casings found at the scene of the crime.
Thompson’s killing prompted a national debate over the costs associated with the U.S. health care system and insurance industry.
Archived Reddit posts believed to be associated with an account that belonged to Mangione detailed that the 26-year-old underwent spinal surgery and struggled with chronic back pain, numbness, and restless sleep. At the time of the shooting, UnitedHealthcare said Mangione was not insured by the company.
In her statement Tuesday, Mangione’s attorney also appeared to try and draw the wider debate over health care into his case.
"While claiming to protect against murder, the federal government moves to commit the pre-meditated, state-sponsored murder of Luigi," she said. "By doing this, they are defending the broken, immoral, and murderous healthcare industry that continues to terrorize the American people."
Mangione is being held in a federal jail in Brooklyn.
