Trump Will Be Long Gone Before Luigi Mangione Faces Execution

A few days after she announced that the Trump administration will seek the death penalty against alleged UnitedHealthcare CEO assassin Luigi Mangione, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi sat down for an interview with Fox News Sunday, where she was asked to respond to fears that the country is in a constitutional crisis. Her answer was predictable. The real constitutional crisis, Bondi said, is the barrage of legal challenges to Trump’s agenda.

“The president is going to comply with the law,” Bondi insisted before making clear that the law is irrelevant in the face of Trump’s mission to Make America Safe Again. Her Department of Justice had just indefinitely suspended a federal prosecutor who admitted in court that there was no evidence against Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man exiled to a Salvadoran prison as a result of an “administrative error” — and whose continued imprisonment was decried by a federal judge as “wholly lawless.” To Bondi, the real problem was the prosecutor. “He shouldn’t have taken the case,” she told the Fox News host. “He shouldn’t have argued it if that’s what he was going to do.”

In other words, DOJ prosecutors must fall in line or pay the consequences.

The exchange was a chilling glimpse of what lies on the horizon when it comes to Trump’s broader priorities. As Trump revamps the DOJ to better suit his agenda, the decision to seek death against Mangione reflects his long-standing desire to ramp up capital punishment. In an executive order immediately following his inauguration, Trump proclaimed his intention to “pursue the death penalty for all crimes of a severity demanding its use.” As Bondi told the Fox News host, “We’re gonna seek the death penalty whenever possible.”

Mangione, 26, is facing trial in three different jurisdictions for the murder of Brian Thompson last December. In addition to state charges in New York and Pennsylvania, Mangione is being prosecuted in the Southern District of New York based on federal gun laws and the allegation that he crossed state lines to stalk and kill Thompson. Although lawyers on both sides have said that Mangione will be tried first in state court, it’s possible this could change. In a statement earlier this month, defense attorney Karen Friedman Agnifilo argued that “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.”

It’s too soon to tell what Mangione’s case might reveal about Trump’s pursuit of death sentences going forward. But Mangione’s lawyers argue that Bondi has trampled the usual process. In a motion filed April 11, they asked a federal judge to block the Trump administration from seeking death against their client, citing its lawless conduct in the Abrego Garcia case. “These are not normal times,” they wrote.

“One of my biggest questions is whether the Department of Justice followed its own policies in making this decision to seek death for Mr. Mangione,” Robin Maher, head of the Death Penalty Information Center, told me in early April. According to the defense motion, the answer is adamantly no. The prosecution is “a political stunt,” the lawyers argue, accusing Bondi of ignoring “the established Department of Justice death penalty protocol, which she has wholly abandoned.”

Although the attorney general retains the authority to decide whether to seek a death sentence, such prosecutions usually originate with a recommendation from a local U.S. attorney. The process includes soliciting input from defense lawyers, who are given a chance to meet with the DOJ’s Review Committee on Capital Cases in Washington D.C., in order to provide any mitigating evidence that would render a death penalty prosecution inappropriate. But Mangione’s lawyers say they were afforded only a single “hastily assembled” video meeting in the last days of Joe Biden’s administration. After Trump took office, there was no word on a final decision. Instead, Bondi issued a press release announcing her goal of executing their client.

This was in stark contrast to the Biden DOJ, which “often took months and in some cases, more than a year” to decided whether or not to seek a death sentence, Maher said. “And I think that timing reflected a cautious approach that is appropriate for any use of the federal death penalty.”

Trump, of course, is not known for his careful deliberation about anything. Fueled by resentments and revenge fantasies, his executive order on the death penalty was itself a rebuke of the Biden DOJ’s reluctance to seek new death sentences — and especially of Biden’s decision to grant clemency to 37 men on federal death row. Although Bondi is wrong to claim, as she did in her Fox interview, that prosecutors never pursued the death penalty under Biden tenure, his DOJ chose only once to seek a new death sentence, against Payton Gendron, the declared white supremacist who in May 2022 slaughtered 10 Black people at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York.

The Buffalo case has yet to go to trial in federal court. Mangione, who has not yet been indicted, is likely to wait years, too. The unique demands of a capital case are both time-consuming and expensive. In addition to the investigative resources required for the guilt phase of any trial, an adequate death penalty defense also involves a separate, in-depth mitigation investigation. The cost can run millions in taxpayer dollars.

No matter how fast Bondi hopes to make an example of Mangione, a death sentence must still ultimately be handed down by a jury. And there’s a world of difference between charging someone like Mangione with a death-eligible crime and persuading 12 people to send him to death row. The last federal defendant who went on trial for his life in a Manhattan courtroom was Sayfullo Saipov, who drove a truck into a crowded bike path on Manhattan’s West side, killing eight people and injuring many more. The horrific attack, carried out in the name of the Islamic State, took place in 2017, Trump’s first year in office. In an all-caps tweet, Trump immediately called for the death penalty. But Saipov did not go to trial until after Trump left office. Although then-Attorney General Merrick Garland pushed forward in seeking death, the jury ultimately deadlocked. Saipov was sentenced to life in prison.

It would be an understatement to say that Mangione is a more sympathetic figure than Saipov among most Americans. Mangione’s folk hero status is such that his defense team has set up a website complete with an FAQ section and a note from their client expressing regret that he cannot respond to every letter he receives. Whatever Trump’s DOJ does to bring him to trial, there is a significant chance a jury will spare his life.

The same is likely to be true of Trump’s future prosecutions. Although there has recently been a resurgence of executions — and an expansion of new methods — in states across the country, jurors continue to reject the death penalty year after year. “The American public has made a very decisive turn away from the death penalty during the last 20 years,” Maher said. “This hasn’t changed, even with President Trump’s enthusiasm for the death penalty.”

What’s Past Is Prologue

In ordinary times, Trump’s ambitions of expanding the death penalty might have been dismissed as a dream whose time has passed. It would be hard to imagine Trump beating the record of his Democratic predecessor, Bill Clinton, whose 1994 crime bill created 60 death-eligible crimes with the stroke of a pen. It was this expansion of the federal death penalty that set the stage for Trump’s execution spree, allowing him to carry out 13 executions in the last six months of his term.

Yet there is a less-discussed flipside to this decades-long history, one that reveals how rarely federal death penalty prosecutions have actually culminated in an execution. The DOJ’s dubious track record is captured in statistics collected by the Federal Death Penalty Resource Counsel, which tracks completed cases dating back to 1988, the year the federal death penalty was reinstated. As of June 2024, 4,983 federal defendants had been charged with death-eligible crimes. Of those, the DOJ authorized a death penalty prosecution for 541 people. In the vast majority of these cases, the outcome was something other than death: 146 people entered a guilty plea before or at trial. Another 151 went to trial but received a life sentence from a jury. In 110 cases, the government withdrew its death penalty authorization before trial or after a death sentence was reversed.

In total, 83 defendants — 15 percent — of the 541 were sentenced to die. And of those 83, 16 have been executed. Today there are only three people remaining on federal death row.

Such figures mirror the history of the so-called “modern” death penalty as a whole. In state after state, the majority of death sentences never lead to an execution. The federal system has only ever represented a small fraction of the nation’s death sentences. Even the most aggressive death penalty push is unlikely to reverse this trend.

As her handling of Mangione’s case suggests, Bondi appears ready to keep pushing prosecutions in non-death penalty states. Last week, the DOJ announced a second death penalty prosecution in Colorado, which abolished capital punishment in 2020. But such a project is neither unprecedented nor a guarantee of success. Some 25 years ago, under George W. Bush, Attorney General John Ashcroft made it a point to aggressively seek death sentences in states without the death penalty. What followed was a bipartisan era of increased capital prosecutions in non-death penalty jurisdictions, with little to show for it.

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