(AFP) – The US attorney general on Sunday defended the administration’s decision to seek the death penalty for Luigi Mangione, the young man accused of gunning down a top health-insurance executive on a New York sidewalk. “The president’s directive was very clear,” Pam Bondi told Fox News Sunday. “We are to seek the death penalty when possible.”
Bondi had announced Tuesday that prosecutors would seek the death penalty for 26-year-old Mangione, accused of having tracked UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson for days before walking up behind him and firing from a pistol. The brazen killing brought to the surface deep public frustration with the US health insurance system, with many social media users painting Mangione not as a villain but as a folk hero. But Bondi told interviewer Shannon Bream that “we’re not going to be deterred by political motives.”
Asked about young people seen wearing T-shirts that say “Free Luigi” or even show him with a halo, Bondi responded: “If there was ever a death case, this is one. This guy is charged with hunting down a CEO, a father of two, a married man, hunting him down and executing him? Yeah. I feel like these young people have lost their way.”
Mangione’s lawyer Karen Friedman Agnifilo has denounced the Justice Department decision as “barbaric” and “political.” The suspect has pleaded not guilty to state charges but has yet to enter a plea on federal charges. President Joe Biden late last year commuted the sentences of nearly every person in a federal prison facing execution.
Public support for the death penalty in the US has steadily declined amid reports showing the innocence of several alleged killers. But Trump vowed during his 2024 campaign to execute those still on federal death rows, saying Biden had commuted the death sentences of “37 of the worst killers in our country.” On January 20, his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order calling for the death penalty in federal crimes involving the murder of a police officer or a capital crime committed by an undocumented alien. He ordered the attorney general to ensure that states allowing capital punishment have sufficient drugs “to carry out lethal injection,” and to evaluate whether the 37 people whose sentences Biden commuted “can be charged with state capital crimes.”
© 2024 AFP
