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.
The department is likely to announce other requests for the death penalty as they review cases where doing so would be appropriate, according to an official with knowledge of the situation.
Thirteen federal inmates were put to death during the final year of Mr. Trump’s first term after an informal 17-year freeze on the practice. In 2019, Attorney General William P. Barr announced the Trump administration’s intention to resume executions of federal death row inmates using a lethal injection of the drug pentobarbital. Legal challenges briefly blocked those efforts.
Federal prosecutors in Manhattan filed murder charges against Mr. Mangione, a resident of Towson, Md., on Dec. 14, citing jurisdiction because he had crossed state lines to commit the crime. The complaint accused Mr. Mangione of traveling from Atlanta to the Port Authority Bus Terminal in New York, where he “meticulously” planned the shooting.
Investigators said he had tracked Mr. Thompson’s movements and staked out his hotel in the days before the killing, after checking into a 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 as he was heading into an early morning investors’ conference at the New York Hilton Midtown.
He pleaded not guilty in both cases.
In an executive order issued on his first day in office, Mr. Trump directed the department to seek the death penalty for “crimes of a severity demanding its use,” without consideration of “other factors.”
The order included two examples that do not appear to directly correspond to the crimes Mr. Mangione is accused of committing: the murder of a law enforcement officer and a capital crime committed by an undocumented immigrant.
That is a reversal of the approach during the Biden administration, which limited death penalty requests to cases involving acts of terrorism and hate-motivated mass murder.
The federal criminal complaint against Mr. Mangione included one count of using a firearm to commit murder, which carried a maximum potential sentence of death, along with two stalking counts and a firearms offense.
Capital cases are rare in New York. The death penalty was effectively outlawed at the state level after a court ruling in 2004.
And the last federal execution in the state took place more than 70 years ago, when a bank robber who had murdered an F.B.I. agent was executed.
To allow for the execution of Mr. Mangione, federal prosecutors would have to convince a group of jurors to vote unanimously for him to be put to death.
The task may be difficult, especially given the public support Mr. Mangione has received since the murder. In 2023, prosecutors sought to put to death Sayfullo Saipov, who was convicted of killing eight people in Manhattan on behalf of the Islamic State.
A jury could not find against him unanimously. Instead, he was sentenced to life in prison.
Last year, federal prosecutors said they would seek the death penalty against the gunman who killed 10 Black people in a racist massacre at a Buffalo supermarket in May 2022. The move was the first time that the Biden administration had sought the execution of a defendant.
In December, Mr. Biden commuted the sentences of 37 of the 40 people on federal death row. The decision spared the lives of prisoners convicted of killing law enforcement officials and committing murder during drug deals and bank robberies.
Three inmates were excluded: Dylann Roof, who murdered nine churchgoers in a racist killing spree in Charleston, S.C., a decade ago; Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the Boston Marathon bomber; and Robert Bowers, who killed 11 people at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in 2018, the deadliest antisemitic attack in the nation’s history.
“Capital punishment is an essential tool for deterring and punishing those who would commit the most heinous crimes and acts of lethal violence against American citizens,” Trump administration officials wrote in the executive order that the president signed.
“Yet for too long, politicians and judges who oppose capital punishment have defied and subverted the laws of our country.”
Benjamin Weiser contributed reporting from New York.
