Attorneys for Luigi Mangione asked a judge to stop federal prosecutors from seeking the death penalty against their client, saying the U.S. government “intends to kill Mr. Mangione as a political stunt.”

The motion filed Friday in the U.S. District Court of the Southern District said U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi ordered the death penalty to “carry out President Trump’s agenda to stop violent crime and Make America Safe Again.”

Mangione, 26, who faces state murder and terrorism charges in New York, along with federal murder and stalking charges, is accused of murdering United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson last year in New York City.

  • @[email protected]
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    017 days ago

    There’s a guy who killed 23 people in a Walmart in El Passo in 2022. Got charged with hate crimes on account of…he’s openly racist and said that’s why he did it.

    That guy just got a plea deal to avoid the death penalty.

    Nobody should identify the criminal justice system in America as anything else but a mechanism for protecting the rich.

    • @[email protected]
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      016 days ago

      I’ve seen this case mentioned a few times but isn’t this standard practice? Don’t they always use the threat of the death penalty to encourage people to take a plea deal?

        • @[email protected]
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          016 days ago

          Average Joe is threatened with over the top judicial punishment, meanwhile Trump doesn’t even have to show up to court most of the time.

      • @[email protected]
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        016 days ago

        thier trying to setup the stage, to poison the jury against him. its a classic tactic when they dont have enough evidence against him.

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      016 days ago

      The death penalty is ethically wrong to me because you can’t trust the system 100%, even in the best case. Death row inmates have been exonerated with additional evidence, or just better processing of existing evidence, or other reasons. Unless the judicial system is 100% accurate (which, spoiler, it neither is nor possibly can be), you introduce the possibility of executing innocent people, which should be abhorrent to everyone.

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        16 days ago

        I think it’s unethical to force someone to be locked up in prison for the rest of their life without 100% certainty also.

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          016 days ago

          Sure, but at least if they’re wrongly incarcerated you can free them and pay damages. You can’t undo death.

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            16 days ago

            I don’t disagree with you, I just don’t think the line for life in prison and death should exist under 100% certain, which is incredibly rare. I’m not sure of a practical solution but I’ve had rough 5-10 year stretches in my life and they are traumatic. No amount of ‘damages’ fixes that or makes someone whole. Sometimes I wonder if people really know what it’s like to be locked up for 5-10+ years when they go off about a sentence being too short. Life without parole is a death sentence just the same as the chair is.

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        016 days ago

        I almost agree, but there are always those people who have earned their death penalty.

        I think we use it way too often, and often for terrible reasons, like to pump up the law & order cred for some scummy DA with ambitions for higher office. But sometimes there is a crime so bad, that the only appropriate response is to remove them from ALL society. Even prisoners shouldnt have to abide their presence among them.

        So i want to preseve it for only the most heinous forms of murder, like serial or mass murder, torture murders, and definitely the deliberate murder of children, but only when the evidence is so overwhelming that there is no doubt of guilt. They must be caught in the act, confess everything, with lots of corroborating evidence and testimony, etc. It should NEVER be applied for anything other than murder. Not for rape, treason, etc.

        Even with all of that, it should only be used a handful of times in a decade, and only after a full review of the evidence and the case.

        But just some cop testifying that he claims he saw one guy kill another? Nuh-uh. People shouldn’t be getting death penalties based on stuff like police or jail-house snitch testimony, or “circumstantial” evidence. Or any police testimony, for that matter. They are proven, enthusiastic liars.

        Given what we know about the murder of this CSKfP (Corporate Serial Killer for Profit), Luigi and Death Penalty shouldn’t be used in the same sentence

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          016 days ago

          only when the evidence is so overwhelming that there is no doubt of guilt.

          That’s already the exact bar to clear for every guilty conviction.

          • @[email protected]
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            016 days ago

            Circumstantial evidence can clear the bar, I’m talking about standard that is higher than that. That has to be necessary if were going to take a life.

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              016 days ago

              I wonder what would clear the bar for sanctioned killing, then.
              Witnesses can be enemies of the accused (especially if they’re police), witness memory is notoriously unreliable, photo and video evidence can be faked, DNA only proves someone was present at the crime scene, not what they did, and confessions can be forced.
              There is literally no way to prove someone’s guilt 100% unless the jury was present during the murder.

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      016 days ago

      In that case, the prosecutor was approached by the victims families. They did not want to the death penalty, because it would have meant having a trial until at least 2028.