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- Luigi Mangione is fighting a federal death penalty charge in the murder of UHC CEO Brian Thompson.
- On Friday, his lawyers asked his judge to find the death penalty unconstitutional.
- The filing starts a back-and-forth of pretrial death penalty litigation that could last years.
Luigi Mangione should not face the death penalty for the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, his lawyers argued early Saturday in a legal filing that criticizes the Trump administration and its top law enforcement officer.
US Attorney General Pam Bondi violated Mangione’s Constitutional due process rights by publicly calling for his execution while a federal grand jury was still hearing evidence, his lawyers argue in the 114-page filing.
The filing also challenges the constitutionality of the death penalty itself, calling it randomly applied.
It asks a federal judge in Manhattan to bar the government from seeking the death penalty in Thompson’s fatal shooting.
The 50-year-old father of two sons was shot dead on December 4, 2024, outside a hotel where he was to address a meeting of UHC investors.
“The parasites simply had it coming,” authorities say Mangione wrote in a notebook recovered during his arrest after a five-day national manhunt.
The Maryland native, a software developer whose last known address was Honolulu, remains in federal custody.
He faces three prosecutions in Thompson’s shooting death, and has pleaded not guilty in each.
His state- and federal-level murder indictments are both based in Manhattan, and he is also charged in a state-level weapons and ID-forgery indictment in Altoona, Pennsylvania, where police arrested him.
Earlier this week, the two top terrorism charges were dismissed from Mangione’s state-level murder indictment. New York Supreme Court Justice Gregory Carro ruled that the charges were legally insufficient.
Federal prosecutors must respond to Friday’s filing before US District Judge Margaret Garnett can decide or order a hearing. Either side can appeal the judge’s decision.
Garnett said at Mangione’s last federal court appearance that she will set a firm 2026 trial date at his next appearance, scheduled for December 5.
Still, Saturday’s filing is the start of a potential back-and-forth of death penalty-related challenges and appeals that could delay a federal trial into 2027, as the defense has said in past court filings.
Even if the death penalty survives all defense challenges, the odds of Mangione being sentenced to death are steep to none, legal experts have told Business Insider.
In 2023, a jury could not reach a unanimous death penalty verdict in the case of Sayfullo Saipov, an avowed ISIS-aligned terrorist who killed eight bicyclists in a Manhattan truck attack in 2017, during President Donald Trump’s first term.
Despite Trump’s urgent backing at the time — “SHOULD GET DEATH PENALTY!” he tweeted after the arrest — more than five years passed from indictment to conviction, and Saipov was ultimately sentenced to life in prison.
Saipov’s lawyers, too, had challenged the death penalty as unconstitutional, calling it cruel, ineffective in stemming crime, confusing for jurors, and arbitrarily applied.
Trump has not publicly endorsed the death penalty in Mangione’s case — but he remains a supporter of capital punishment.
In a day-one executive order on January 20, 2025, Trump directed that the attorney general seek the death penalty “where possible.”
Three months later, Bondi announced that she had directed prosecutors to seek the death penalty for Mangione.
“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 at the time.