The powers that be are still so mad that the American public refuses to hate Luigi Mangione. Some Americans are very much on Team Luigi – either they support him no matter what, or they support him because they think he’s innocent (perhaps even a patsy) of murdering UnitedHealthcare executive Brian Thompson. The Americans who are not on Team Luigi aren’t that mad about him either – they’re not pro-murder, per se, they just think that it’s a weird case and it’s being handled in a weird way. In any case, law enforcement and prosecutors keep trying to convince everyone that Luigi is some kind of evil monster and no one is buying it. They’re even charging him with terrorism. And now the US Attorney General says that the federal government is seeking the death penalty on Luigi. Really??
Attorney General Pam Bondi said on Tuesday that she would seek the death penalty for Luigi Mangione, who was charged with murdering a UnitedHealthcare executive in Manhattan last year, part of a push to revive the widespread use of capital punishment in federal cases.
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 death penalty requests after President Biden declared a moratorium on capital punishment for most federal offenders in 2021.
The move, which was widely anticipated, represented the intersection of Mr. Trump’s eagerness to impose the death penalty with a headline-grabbing murder case — the brazen public killing of Brian Thompson, a 50-year-old health care executive targeted because Mr. Mangione saw him as a symbol of callous corporate greed, according to prosecutors.
“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.
Ms. Bondi directed Matthew Podolsky, the acting U.S. attorney in Manhattan, to seek the death penalty. Nicholas Biase, a spokesman for the office, which has been prosecuting Mr. Mangione’s federal case, declined to comment on Tuesday.
In a statement, one of Mr. Mangione’s defense lawyers, Karen Friedman Agnifilo, said that seeking the death penalty in the case amounted to “premeditated, state-sponsored murder” intended to protect the “immoral” health care industry. The decision “to execute Luigi” ran counter to “historical precedent,” she added.
It is not clear if the Justice Department, under Ms. Bondi, has requested the use of the death penalty since Mr. Trump took office in January, but the request is among the first.
For whatever record, the Attorney General can announce any damn thing she wants, that doesn’t mean it’s actually going to happen. The best way to mitigate Luigi getting a lethal injection is for the prosecution’s case to fall apart at trial and Luigi gets acquitted. I say that because I still think that, regardless if you love or hate Luigi, everything I’ve seen indicates that the case against Luigi is extremely flimsy. It’s very likely that his arrest involved multiple instances of illegal surveillance and planted evidence.
Photos courtesy of Getty, Backgrid.
