Photo: Kevin C. Downs/Redux
It wasn’t a shock when U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi announced this month that the federal government would seek the death penalty for the most famous accused murderer in the country. One of the first executive orders Donald Trump signed upon retaking office directs her to seek it whenever possible, and Luigi Mangione — who also faces cases in New York and Pennsylvania for his alleged murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson — had been sitting in a federal jail in Brooklyn since December, awaiting an indictment. Bondi wasn’t coy about why she wanted Mangione’s to be a capital case; she declared that it was part of her mission to “carry out President Trump’s agenda to stop violent crime and Make America Safe Again.” Mangione’s lead defense lawyer, Karen Friedman Agnifilo, called this “political” and “barbaric.” In a statement, she wrote, “While claiming to protect against murder, the federal government moves to commit the pre-meditated, state-sponsored murder of Luigi.” Last week, a grand jury indicted her client on four counts, including murder with a firearm. This afternoon he’ll enter his plea at Manhattan’s Southern District court, as the first capital case of Trump Two.
In both the number and pace of his federal executions, Trump has no rival in the 21st or 20th centuries. During the last six months of his first term — while Americans’ attention was yanked away by school reopenings, COVID deaths, vaccine news, protests and police violence, and the desperate runup to the presidential election — his administration embarked on a killing spree that resulted in the deaths of 13 people on death row. It started July 14, 2020, when the federal government executed Daniel Lewis Lee, a man who was convicted of murder, racketeering, and conspiracy and who was on death row for over two decades. In total, the Trump administration killed 12 men and one woman, all with lethal injections of pentobarbital.
Executions are declining around the country, but they are especially rare in the federal system. Before Lee, the federal government had not executed anyone in 17 years. Trump’s administration executed more people than the past ten presidents combined. The last time so many people were executed by the federal government during a single presidential term was during Grover Cleveland’s second term in the 1890s. The Trump administration was in such a hurry to execute that one man, Wesley Purkey, still had an appeal pending in court when he was killed. The last to die, Dustin Higgs, was killed just four days before Biden’s inauguration and while recovering from COVID; he was Black, and his execution was originally scheduled for Martin Luther King Jr’s birthday.
Strangely, Trump’s loudest critics rarely mention his love of capital punishment. Trump makes up for that by mentioning it constantly. “Death penalty all the way,” he blared at a campaign rally in 2016. “I’ve always supported the death penalty. I don’t even understand people that don’t…I have friends that are good people and they say no, no, it’s cruel and unusual punishment. What is that?” He famously lobbied for the execution of the wrongly convicted Central Park Five and claims that capital punishment for drug offenders would solve the country’s drug problems, using China and Singapore as evidence that it works. He wants to impose the death penalty for rape, despite being an accused rapist himself. There were no federal executions during Biden’s presidency; he’d once promised he would abolish the death penalty on the federal level but in the end his administration didn’t seem to try, choosing to put a moratorium on executions instead. When Biden commuted the sentences of 37 people on death row, he left three men behind who could still face execution. Biden left an opening — and Trump is running through it.
This could be why Mangione’s capital case is moving so fast. Usually, the DOJ will take many months or even a year before deciding if a case should carry the death penalty. The department took nearly two years after the 2022 mass shooting in Buffalo to announce it was seeking the death penalty for perpetrator Payton Gendron, the white supremacist who killed ten people. But Mangione hadn’t even been indicted in federal court when Bondi announced her intentions, jumping on Fox News Sunday and posting on Instagram to promote her decision; she did this before a grand jury had decided if prosecutors had enough evidence to justify seeking the death penalty for Mangione at all. Bondi could’ve prejudiced any juror who saw her press tour. “That the department did not even wait for the grand jury to return a federal indictment—to my knowledge that has not happened before,” says Robin Maher, a former DOJ employee and federal public defender who is now the executive director of the nonprofit Death Penalty Information Center.
The not-happened-befores under Trump can be numbing. Why should we expect his administration to follow procedure? It can be worse, sometimes, when it does. The cruelest thing about executions under Trump is not their departure from American norms but their dogged adherence to a playbook established by states including Texas, Oklahoma, and Alabama. (Although capital punishment is still legal in 27 states, four of those have put executions on pause.) Like Trump’s executions, most state executions are done by lethal injection. Although officials claim this kind of death is painless, doctors and observers of many executions argue it can be the opposite. The drug that the federal government used during its last spree, pentobarbital, can cause the person injected to develop pulmonary edema, filling their lungs with fluid and bloody foam. This can cause panic, pain, and a feeling of drowning. One judge in Ohio compared the effect of pulmonary edema to that of waterboarding. Adding to this, many executioners are incompetent, struggling just to set an IV in an inmate’s arm. Executions are botched while those in charge — who are rarely medical professionals — spend hours poking needles all over inmates bodies’ and even cutting into their flesh to find a vein. Alabama’s executioners are so bad at this that the state has started using nitrogen gas instead. Some people facing death have chosen the primitive and unreliable electric chair just to avoid a lethal injection. In the past two months, two men in South Carolina have each opted to face a firing squad instead.
Both capital punishment states and the federal government attempt to shroud their processes in secrecy. Requests for transparency on procedure are either dismissed or redacted to oblivion. Officials claim this is to protect the people involved, but it’s just as likely that it’s because they don’t want tax payers to know how much it all costs. During Trump’s last run of federal executions, the ACLU obtained records from the Bureau of Prisons that allowed it to calculate the cost of the first five alone: They cost about $4.7 million, or more than $900,000 per death. “People often assume that it is more expensive to keep someone in prison with a sentence other than death, but in fact, the death penalty is enormously resource-intensive,” says Maher. “Capital cases are many times more expensive than incarcerating someone in a maximum security prison for the rest of their natural life.” (A report from 2010 found that it could be as much as eight times more.) This would also hold true for Mangione’s case. Maher attributes the cost to everything from the prolonged trials and appeals processes to increased staffing to the many extra expenses of keeping death row inmates in solitary confinement — as well as to the cost of the drugs themselves, which officials struggle to obtain in part because Big Pharma refuses to sell material for capital punishment. (Even they have a limit.) Maher says that increasing capital punishment is “inconsistent with what we’re hearing from the Trump administration, which says it’s been singlemindedly focused on efficiencies and cutting costs for taxpayers.”
Taxpayers don’t know the costs and they almost certainly don’t know the method. Last fall, a Gallup poll found that more than half of respondents did support the death penalty for someone convicted of murder. As always in these polls, it was a question thrown into the void. The respondents didn’t answer based on the price tag. They didn’t learn how many people on death row have been exonerated — 200 in the past 50 years — or that there’s no evidence the death penalty deters crime. They weren’t told that a third of the executions attempted in 2022 were botched, or that many relatives of people who are murdered oppose the death penalty. Capital cases move slowly and it could be years before Mangione’s is over. If he is convicted, if he is sent to death row, he would join three mass shooters: Dylann Roof, who killed nine people at a Black church in Charleston; Robert Bowers, who killed 11 at a synagogue in Pittsburgh; and the Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who with his brother killed three people and injured over 260 others. Mangione would be an outlier for another reason too: He could be the first person sentenced to death by a Manhattan jury in more than 60 years.
