U.S. attorneys formally told the court Thursday that they planned to seek the death penalty for Luigi Mangione, who was accused of killing a United Health executive in New York last year.
Mangione, 26, will appear in federal court in Manhattan on Friday afternoon. He pleaded not guilty to his separate indictment for the killing of UnitedHealth insurance CEO Brian Thompson.
Prosecuting his decision, the prosecutor wrote that Mangion “poses a future danger because he intends to target the entire industry by involving deadly violence and hold political and social opposition to the industry.”
U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi announced earlier this month that the Justice Department would seek death penalty for Mangione. The U.S. Attorney's Office in Manhattan filed a formal prosecutor's intention to sentence death.
Mangione's lawyer said Bondy's April 1 declaration “unparalleled politics” violated the government's decision to death.
If Mangione is convicted in a federal case, the jury will determine whether to recommend the death penalty in a separate phase of the trial. Any such recommendation must be consistent and the judge must impose it.
UnitedHealth Group CEO Andrew Witty mourned the killing of executive Brian Thompson and said he was frustrated with the public in a New York Times article on Friday. This is his first public comment since United Health Insurance CEO Thompson was shot last week.
Thompson was shot dead on December 4 outside a hotel in Midtown Manhattan where the company was gathering for an investor meeting. The bold killing and the subsequent five-day raid attracted Americans.
Police in Altoona, Pennsylvania, found Mangione with a 9mm pistol and muffler, clothes matching the outfit Thompson shooter wore in surveillance video, and a notebook that described an intention to “wack” the insurance company’s CEO, according to court documents.
Some Americans cheered on Mangione, who is not called UnitedHealth customers or clients, said he was paying attention to the steep U.S. health care costs and the power of health insurance companies refusing to pay for certain treatments.
Mangione is held in the federal lockdown in Brooklyn.
A group of people, many supporters flocked to New York City Court, Luigi Mangione pleaded not guilty to charges of first-degree murder and terrorism in the death of United Health Care CEO Brian Thompson.
The decision to seek the death penalty restored a practice in the first Donald Trump administration, when 13 executions were conducted between July 2020 and January 2021.
Prior to that, during Barack Obama's presidency or George W. Bush.
Attorney General Merrick Garland in Joe Biden's administration instituted a moratorium on federal executions in 2021 pending a review of procedures, although two death penalty cases with origins that predated the Biden president continued — one involving an antisemitic gunman who murdered 11 people at a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018 and another for the accused in a Buffalo supermarket mass shooting.
The Justice Department under Garland refused to sentence death to other mass killings, including hatred of the gunman, who killed 23 people in 2019 at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas. The gunman Patrick Crusius was sentenced to life imprisonment this week.
