The Attorney General’s Office is seeking the death penalty against the accused killer of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson.
“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. After careful consideration, I have directed federal prosecutors to seek the death penalty in this case as we carry out President Trump’s agenda to stop violent crime and Make America Safe Again,” the AG said in an April 1 press release.
Mangione’s lawyers hit back, calling Attorney General Pam Bondi’s instruction to U.S. Attorney Matthew Podolsky “barbaric” and “political.”
“This is a corrupt web of government dysfunction and one-upmanship,” Karen Friedman Agnifilo was quoted by NBC. “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.”
Bondi’s directive brings additional attention to a legal case still in its infancy. Mangione has still not been indicted on federal charges.
For the time being, only Mangione’s state-level charges are headed to trial, and he has pled not guilty.
He also faces legal challenges in Pennsylvania, where he was arrested in December. The commonwealth’s police reportedly found the defendant with a gun and silencer and fake IDs, including one New York police said he used days before the shooting to check into a hostel in the city.
One of Mangione’s lawyers asked the Blair County court to suppress this evidence because the authorities allegedly detained Mangione at a McDonald’s without sufficient evidence that he was a legitimate suspect.
A legal expert not connected to the prosecution or the defense weighed in on the motion to The Guardian.
“Even if this motion is successful, it doesn’t mean that Luigi Mangione walks out of prison,” criminal defense attorney Ron Kuby told the British news source. “All it means is that the items that were seized from him, or seized that belong to him, can’t be used as evidence against him.”
Then, the lawyer pointed toward a piece of heavily contested evidence to make his next point.
“That would certainly hurt the prosecution’s case, but he was on video, shooting a man in the back,” Kuby said. “Substantial evidence remains, including his travel and other things.”
He found the merits of this suppression motion to be “surprisingly good” and noted the high stakes by saying, “So much depends on what happens at a hearing.”
Some legal minds have found the prospects of Mangione walking free to be slim without a psychiatric defense.
“I think the only real defense that you can possibly have here is some kind of insanity or mental defect defense,” former Watergate prosecutor and Assistant U.S. Attorney Nick Akerman told CNN.