It is the first time the Justice Department has sought to bring the death penalty since President Donald Trump returned to office in January with a vow to resume federal executions.
Mangione, a 26-year-old Ivy League graduate, faces separate federal and state murder charges for the killing, which rattled the business community while galvanizing health insurance critics.
The federal charges include murder through use of a firearm, which carries the possibility of the death penalty. The state charges carry a maximum punishment of life in prison. Mangione has pleaded not guilty to a state indictment and has not entered a plea to the federal charges.
“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,” Bondi said in a statement that described Thompson’s killing as “an act of political violence.”
Thompson, 50, was ambushed and shot on a sidewalk outside the New York Hilton Midtown as he arrived for his company’s annual investor conference.
Mangione's case is the first time Bondi has ordered prosecutors to pursue the death penalty since she took office in February and immediately lifted a moratorium that that had been imposed under former President Joe Biden's administration. The Trump administration has signaled it will aggressively push for death sentences for certain crimes, accusing the Biden administration of going easy on violent criminals.
Biden campaigned on a pledge to work toward abolishing federal capital punishment but took no major steps to that end. But in his final days in office, the Democratic president commuted the sentences of 37 of the 40 people on death row, converting their punishments to life in prison.
