A defining feature of Donald Trump’s final months as president was his oversight of the killings, authorized in quick succession at the Federal Bureau of Prisons, of 13 people on federal death row. It was without modern precedent. By comparison, the federal government had executed only three people in the more than five decades since the US ended, and then restarted, its reliance on capital punishment.
Picking up where he left off, Trump, on his first day back in office in January, ordered his soon-to-be-confirmed attorney general, Pam Bondi, to “pursue the death penalty for all crimes of a severity demanding its use.” Bondi’s subsequent marching orders to federal prosecutors included lifting the moratorium on capital punishment imposed by her predecessor, Merrick Garland; instructing that decisions to not seek the death penalty from the prior four years be reviewed; and ordering US attorneys to affirmatively pursue death sentences “for the most serious, readily provable offenses,” and to do so in a manner “consistent with the relevant statutory considerations and other applicable regulations and Department of Justice guidance.” Government-sanctioned executions, as Bondi’s day-one memorandum made clear, were “among the Department’s most serious and solemn responsibilities.”
Yet rather than letting her directives trickle down in due course, allowing prosecutors to follow them alongside the exhaustive rules in place for federal death penalty cases—as essentially all her modern predecessors have—the administration very publicly played by different rules in one of the department’s highest-profile prosecutions: that of Luigi Mangione. On April 1, the 27-year-old, who hadn’t yet been federally indicted over the murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, became the first recipient, during the second Trump presidency, of a death notice from the Justice Department. (The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office separately indicted him in December; because New York abolished the death penalty, the charges carry the possibility of lifetime imprisonment.)
One federal database listing hundreds of capital defendants authorized by the agency in the modern era, going back decades, lists Mangione as the 549th authorization, with this extraordinary notation: “Attorney General Pam Bondi directed authorization before the filing of an indictment or a Department of Justice meeting.”
It would be more than three weeks before the Justice Department filed its death notice in a court of law. Instead, breaking with long-standing protocol and practice, the attorney general announced her decision in a public forum. “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,” she said in a statement. “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.”
“I’ve been handling capital cases for over 20 years, and I’ve never seen anything like it,” one longtime criminal defense lawyer who has represented high-profile capital defendants in the Southern District of New York, where federal prosecutors hope to try Mangione, told Vanity Fair. “There’s a very detailed process that is supposed to be followed that is spelled out in the Justice Manual, and for the attorney general to just preempt that process is unheard of, as far as I know.”
Numerous sources with knowledge of how the Justice Department goes about seeking the death penalty confirmed the move was without modern precedent. Since Congress’s reinstatement of the federal death penalty in 1988, no attorney general has never publicly announced an intent to seek capital punishment under the circumstances Bondi did—leapfrogging local federal prosecutors and a comprehensive mitigation presentation by the defense, all before a grand jury had even returned an indictment charging death-eligible offenses. These and other steps are set out in the rule book for how the federal death penalty ought to be pursued. Further pushing the prosecution into uncharted territory, the Justice Department published its announcement via a freshly opened Instagram account, created for Bondi’s official use. (Both the Justice Department and the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York declined to make comment for this story.)
This publicity blitz stunned Mangione’s defense team—as well as those with deep knowledge of how the federal death penalty, under the law and well-settled practice, must be sought. Karen Friedman Agnifilo, the lawyer leading Mangione’s defense, immediately cried foul, calling out the Justice Department as “dysfunctional” and “barbaric.” The decision “goes against the recommendation of the local federal prosecutors, the law, and historical precedent,” she said in her own statement.
In a sit-down interview with Fox News a few days later, still nearly two weeks before Mangione would be federally indicted, Bondi doubled down. She omitted that Mangione, like every other accused person in the criminal system, is entitled to the presumption of innocence. She seemed unmoved by a Politico item suggesting that her decision would cost Trump those Gen Z voters who have rallied behind Mangione, who for many has become a symbol against the nation’s privatized and notoriously predatory health care industry. “I feel like these young people have lost their way,” Bondi said.
In a court filing lodged weeks later, while Mangione still remained unindicted on federal offenses, his lawyers denounced Bondi’s moves as a political stunt that prejudiced their client, expressing a desire to “stop this corrupt process in its tracks.”
“The Attorney General’s pattern of public statements show with remarkable clarity and consistency that she has ordered this capital prosecution unabashedly for political reasons, that her statements prejudice any potential grand jury pool, and that the victim’s professional status as a CEO was relevant to her decision,” they wrote.
Federal prosecutors in Manhattan brushed aside those concerns as “premature.” In a follow-up filing on April 16, Mangione’s lawyers once again asked for the court to step in and to preclude the Justice Department from pursuing the ultimate punishment. “Without this Court’s intervention, the Government will continue to violate Mr. Mangione’s due process rights as they seek the death penalty,” they wrote.
One day after that request, an unsealed, four-count federal indictment formally charged Mangione with—among other charges—murder through the use of a firearm, an offense punishable by death. And a week later, on April 24, just as Mangione was expected to appear in federal court for his arraignment on this new set of charges, the Justice Department, through the US Attorney’s Office in Manhattan, filed—finally and formally—its death notice.
During his highly publicized federal court appearance on April 25, Mangione, as a matter of course, pleaded not guilty. But the judge left the door open for his lawyers to once again raise the issue of “any pre-indictment conduct by the government”—and the suggestion that Bondi’s intent to seek the death penalty be rejected outright.
“In other words,” as US district judge Margaret Garnett said in open court, she would like to entertain “arguments directly going to whether I should preclude the government from seeking the possibility of capital punishment as a punishment in this case.”
Bondi’s Justice Department’s aggressive pursuit of the death penalty, with an apparent lack of regard for the established rules and processes that come with it, has been facing pushback from a number of federal judges. As of August 22, according to the Associated Press, her agency has sought the death penalty against 19 people.
One major stumbling block in this campaign has been the department’s attempts to reorient cases filed or set in motion during the prior administration, as it has with Mangione’s. This spring, Chief Judge Robert Molloy, of the federal district court in the US Virgin Islands, took issue with a Justice Department request to pause a noncapital prosecution well on its way to trial—all because prosecutors wanted time to reassess the Biden administration’s decision, made in February of last year, to not pursue a death sentence.
Bondi’s reversal in the Virgin Islands case, a murder prosecution, prompted the judge to immediately appoint a defense attorney “learned in the law applicable to capital cases,” as the law requires. And then the judge sternly denied the government’s request to pause the case, strongly implying that he might strike the belated death notice altogether. (Mangione didn’t have his own capital counsel until February, when a judge appointed one such lawyer on the eve of Bondi’s new death penalty policy.)
On August 18, Molloy struck the notice, letting the case proceed as a noncapital case. In quick succession, another judge in the same district announced her own intent to strike two other death notices in cases where a noncapital trial was “fast-approaching,” according to The Virgin Islands Daily News.
These judges didn’t act in a vacuum. Molloy relied on the “persuasive” reasoning of two other federal judges, in Nevada and Maryland, who were among the first to block the Justice Department’s about-face from the Biden years. In May, with 12 days to go before a scheduled trial in Nevada, a federal judge excoriated Bondi’s Justice Department for filing a death notice in a case where the Garland Justice Department, some eight months earlier, had already declined to do so. In a lengthy order striking down the death notice, the judge explained that the government’s maneuver, characterized as “a wholesale reversal at the eleventh hour,” went against “the Court’s orders, its statutory obligations under the Federal Death Penalty Act, and Defendant’s rights to due process and a speedy trial.”
In June, a different judge in Maryland struck down three death notices filed by the Bondi Justice Department ahead of a racketeering conspiracy trial set to start in September; that the case involved accused MS-13 members from Honduras and El Salvador, and without legal authorization to be here—the kind of defendants the Trump administration has publicly gone after—was not relevant to the judge’s ruling. Quoting from the Nevada case, US district judge Stephanie Gallagher all but accused federal prosecutors of playing “fast and loose” in matters of life or death. “Despite the government’s repeated assertions to the contrary, our legal system has always recognized that death is different,” the judge wrote. “We demand the most from the government when it seeks to impose an irrevocable penalty.”
Ahead of that ruling, David Ruhnke, a federal death penalty lawyer with decades of experience representing a range of capital defendants as court-appointed learned counsel, filed a sworn declaration with the judge to advise that it would be “professionally irresponsible” to even accept being appointed in the Maryland cases, given the short trial schedule and all the preparation and mitigation work that must occur under long-established procedures.
In an interview with Vanity Fair, Ruhnke said that the Justice Department’s moves in the Mangione case were far from anything he had seen in his career. “I think it’s unprecedented,” he said. “I don’t think any case has been that quickly authorized.”
When a defendant’s life is at stake,” the Supreme Court cautioned in 1976, courts must be “particularly sensitive that every safeguard is observed.” To that end, in federal death penalty cases, there are legally required mitigating factors that must be considered before a death notice is even authorized. According to comprehensive Justice Department rules still in place, Bondi has no discretion in this area: “No final decision to seek the death penalty shall be made if defense counsel has not been afforded an opportunity to present evidence and argument in mitigation.”
In Mangione’s case, his legal team had a quickly convened Zoom meeting in January with Garland’s capital committee, which didn’t render a decision, but has not met with Bondi’s. “Since the change in administration, counsel has not been asked for a submission or offered the opportunity to meet with the Capital Case Committee formed by and existing under the current administration,” Mangione’s lawyers wrote in a filing before his federal indictment in April.
Mangione’s team argued that the death penalty was not justified because the Manhattan’s district attorney’s case amounted to an “effective prosecution” under the rules, and thus there was no “substantial federal interest” overriding that prosecution. (At Mangione’s next court hearing in the Manhattan case, on Tuesday, his lawyers are expected to argue that the trial there cannot proceed at all while the death sentence matter remains up in the air in the federal case.) The lawyers also contended that Mangione’s case, unlike other past death penalty prosecutions in the Southern District of New York, was a true outlier; all the others involved markedly different circumstances—including, most recently, the case of Sayfullo Saipov, who in 2023 was condemned to die in prison over an ISIS-inspired attack that killed eight people and injured many others in Lower Manhattan. “Every one of the cases involved defendants who committed murder as part of a violent drug or racketeering enterprise, in furtherance of a narcotics business or as part of a terrorist organization,” Mangione’s lawyers wrote.
The defense team also argued that the only aggravating factor potentially justifying a death sentence, under the law, was that the offense involved “substantial planning and premeditation.” They said a second factor, that Mangione’s alleged conduct “knowingly created a risk of death” to other bystanders, didn’t really apply because the time and place of the incident—in the morning, when the streets were relatively empty—as well as the manner in which Mangione allegedly killed Thompson—by targeting a single individual at close range—didn’t quite fit the bill.
In her April 1 announcement, Bondi appeared to get around these arguments by accusing Mangione of “an act of political violence.” Without further elaboration, she wrote that “the murder took place in public with bystanders nearby” and “may have posed grave risk of death to additional persons.” The attorney general’s formal death notice weeks later added other nonstatutory factors carrying less weight, such as the impact on Thompson’s family and Mangione’s so-called “future dangerousness.”
Yet before a death notice can be served, in the regular course, every word of these accusations requires a fact-intensive investigation by the prosecution and the defense. And if prosecutors wish to charge ahead with a capital indictment, they need evidence to overcome any facts that undermine it. The evidence, according to the rules, “must be substantial, admissible, and reliable.”
Because Mangione and his lawyers are essentially in the dark about what Bondi and federal prosecutors plan to present as evidence in support of a death sentence—they’re “blind,” in their own words—his right to due process under the Fifth Amendment, which explicitly contemplates capital punishment, threatens to be violated. The same goes for his Sixth Amendment rights to counsel, to a fair trial, to confront the witnesses against him, and to know the full nature of the charges against him. And as the Supreme Court has long recognized, a death sentence that violates key constitutional safeguards also violates the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. Death is indeed different.
Through his own learned counsel, Avraham Moskowitz, Mangione invoked all three amendments in a new motion, filed in late July, demanding “an informational outline.” That is, for the Justice Department to lay out with specificity the aggravating factors justifying a death sentence. “At a capital-sentencing phase, with Mr. Mangione’s life at stake, the right to meaningful notice of the government’s aggravating factors enjoys heightened, due-process protection.”
These factors have nothing to do with the question of Mangione’s guilt; if a capital jury were to find him guilty—and there’s a long road still ahead for that—a second, penalty-phase trial would begin. There, federal prosecutors would have to prove each of the aggravating factors charged—as specified in the law—beyond a reasonable doubt, and jurors would need to be unanimous on each of those factors before being able to return a death verdict. And that would only come after jurors had also considered any mitigating factors about Mangione’s own life, mental health, and background that might create reasonable doubt in their minds and thus lead him to be spared.
On August 27, the Justice Department opposed Mangione’s request for additional information on the aggravating factors, arguing that the government had already produced “extensive evidentiary detail” for the defense—in the form of more than five terabytes of data, including surveillance footage and a diary in which Mangione is alleged to have written that he wanted to “wack the CEO” of a health insurance company at an investor conference. (Judge Garnett recently granted Mangione access to a secure laptop on which he can review this discovery and assist in his own defense.)
Absent from this latest government filing was any mention of Bondi’s extrajudicial death notice; in a section reviewing the timeline of the Trump administration’s push for a death sentence, federal prosecutors completely skipped over the attorney general’s pre-indictment statements. The stage is now set for Mangione’s next move, as already telegraphed in earlier filings: a frontal legal challenge to the constitutionality of the Justice Department’s decision to put him to death. Will Judge Garnett join the chorus of judges striking down other unusual death notices? As another criminal defense lawyer with many years of federal capital experience in Manhattan told me in an email, “This is purely about publicity and has nothing to do with equity, if the death penalty can ever be equitable.”
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