A federal judge ruled that Luigi Mangione, the alleged killer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, will not receive the death penalty.
U.S. District Judge Margaret Garnett of the Southern District of New York dismissed two of the four federal counts against Mangione. One of the dismissed charges, murder through the use of a firearm, carried the death penalty. The other dismissed charge related to using a firearm during stalking.
Garnett wrote in the opinion that the “chief practical effect of the legal infirmities of Counts Three and Four, and this Court’s decision that they must be dismissed, is solely to foreclose the death penalty as an available punishment to be considered by the jury that will otherwise determine, at trial, whether to convict the Defendant for causing Brian Thompson’s death.”
“The analysis contained in the balance of this opinion may strike the average person—and indeed many lawyers and judges—as tortured and strange, and the result may seem contrary to our intuitions about the criminal law,” Garnett wrote, adding, “But it represents the Court’s committed effort to faithfully apply the dictates of the Supreme Court to the charges in this case.”
In April 2025, Attorney General Pam Bondi announced that she “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.”
The filing said that “a sentence of death is justified” and that the “United States will seek the sentence of death for this offense: Murder through Use of a Firearm, in violation of Title 18, United States Code, Section 924(j), which carries a possible sentence of death.”
