One month after Attorney General Pam Bondi announced she was lifting the moratorium on federal executions imposed by former Attorney General Merrick Garland in 2021, she announced that she had directed New York’s Acting U.S. Attorney to seek the death penalty in the case of 27-year-old Luigi Mangione for the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in Midtown Manhattan in December. The killing, she stated, “was a premeditated, cold-blooded assassination” that “may have posed grave risk of death to additional persons.”
On Saturday, Mangione’s lawyers filed a motion to dismiss the federal indictment filed against him stating that “The actions of the United States Attorney General, federal and state law enforcement, the New York City Mayor and others have violated Mr. Mangione’s constitutional and statutory rights and have fatally prejudiced this death penalty case in six ways,” including the AG’s “extrajudicial statements” in an April press release, in an Instagram post, in a Fox News appearance, and in an “unconstitutional, staged, ‘perp walk.'” The perp walk featured Mangione surrounded by “upwards of 50 armed agents in sunglasses, black jackets, and black semi-automatic rifles,” so the press, “which the agents summoned and assembled, could depict him forever as what our elected representatives and law enforcement officials wanted him to be: a guilty terrorist deserving of execution.”
The motion points out that the AG “rolled out the new administration’s death penalty agenda by making the Mangione case the first in which her Justice Department would seek the death penalty. As a result, when Mangione’s counsel asked the prosecutors for an opportunity to present mitigating factors, this request was denied. The death penalty decision had already been made, because it was being sought based on politics, not merit.”
Earlier in the week, the state terrorism charges Mangione was facing were dropped after New York Supreme Court Justice Gregory Carro said the evidence doesn’t support charges of murder in the first and second degree under the state’s terrorism statute, the Washington Post reported. He still faces murder in the second degree, but “no longer faces the possibility of life in prison without parole,” according to the paper.