Umair
Attorney General Pam Bondi announced on Tuesday that she would seek the death penalty of Luigi Mangione, who was charged with murdering the UnitedHealthcare executive Brian Thompson in front of a hotel in midtown Manhattan last December.
Ms. Bondi said her decision came after “careful consideration” and was in line with President Trump’s executive order directing the Justice Department to renew use of the death penalty requests after President Biden declared a moratorium on capital punishment for most federal offenders in 2021.
“Luigi Mangione’s murder of Brian Thompson — an innocent man and father of two young children — was a premeditated, coldblooded assassination that shocked America,” Ms. Bondi said in a statement.
Nicholas Biase, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan, which has been prosecuting Mr. Mangione’s federal case, declined to comment on Tuesday.
Federal prosecutors in Manhattan filed murder charges against Mr. Mangione, a resident of Towson, Md., on Dec. 14. The complaint accused him of “meticulously” planning the shooting. Investigators said he tracked Mr. Thompson’s movements and staked out his hotel in the days before the killing, after checking into an hostel on the Upper West Side using false identification.
The Manhattan district attorney’s office charged Mr. Mangione with first-degree murder later that month. He faces the possibility of life in prison without parole on those charges.
Mr. Mangione, 26, was arrested at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pa., five days after a hooded gunman fitting his description approached Mr. Thompson on the sidewalk as he was heading into an early morning investors conference at the New York Hilton Midtown.
Benjamin Weiser contributed reporting from New York.
