Luigi Mangione pleaded not guilty on Friday to federal charges of gunning down health insurance executive Brian Thompson, a day after prosecutors formally stated their intent to seek the death penalty.
Mangione, 26, wore a tan jail-issued T-shirt as he was led into the packed lower Manhattan courtroom. He previously pleaded not guilty to a separate set of New York state charges over the Dec. 4 killing of Thompson, the former CEO of UnitedHealth Group’s insurance unit UnitedHealthcare.
He entered the plea at an arraignment before U.S. District Judge Margaret Garnett.
U.S. prosecutors formally told a court on Thursday that they plan to seek the death penalty for Mangione.
In justifying their decision, prosecutors wrote in their filing that Mangione “presents a future danger because he expressed an intent to target an entire industry, and rally political and social opposition to that industry, by engaging in an act of lethal violence.”
U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi earlier this month announced that the Justice Department would seek the death penalty for Mangione. The court filing on Thursday by the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office formalizes prosecutors’ intent to impose the death penalty.
Mangione’s lawyers have said Bondi’s April 1 announcement was “unapologetically political” and breached government protocols for death penalty decisions.
If Mangione is convicted in the federal case, the jury would determine in a separate phase of the trial whether to recommend the death penalty. Any such recommendation must be unanimous, and the judge would be required to impose it.
UnitedHealth Group CEO Andrew Witty mourned the killing of executive Brian Thompson and said he understood public frustrations with the ‘flawed’ U.S. health-care system on Friday, in a New York Times opinion piece. It was his first public comment since Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealth’s health insurance unit, was shot dead last week.
Thompson was shot dead on Dec. 4 outside a hotel in midtown Manhattan, where the company was gathering for an investor conference. The brazen killing and ensuing five-day manhunt captivated Americans.
Police officers in Altoona, Pa., found Mangione with a 9-mm pistol and silencer, clothing that matched the apparel worn by Thompson’s shooter in surveillance footage and a notebook describing an intent to “wack” an insurance company CEO, according to a court filing.
Some Americans have cheered Mangione, who was not known to be a UnitedHealth customer or client, saying he drew attention to steep U.S. health-care costs and the power of health insurers to refuse payment for some treatments.
Mangione is being held in federal lockup in Brooklyn.
A crowd of people, many supporters, flocked to a New York City courthouse, where Luigi Mangione pleaded not guilty to charges of first-degree murder and terrorism in the death of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.
The decision to seek the death penalty revives a practice seen in the first Donald Trump administration, when 13 executions were carried out between July 2020 and January 2021.
Prior to that, there’d been 17-year pause in executions of federal inmates, with none carried out during the presidency of Barack Obama or during the second term of George W. Bush.
Attorney General Merrick Garland in Joe Biden’s administration instituted a moratorium on federal executions in 2021 pending a review of procedures, although two death penalty cases with origins that predated the Biden presidency continued — one involving an antisemitic gunman who murdered 11 people at a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018 and another for the accused in a Buffalo supermarket mass shooting.
The Justice Department under Garland declined to pursue the death penalty in other mass killings, including the gunman motivated by a hatred of immigrants who killed 23 people at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, in 2019. That gunman, Patrick Crusius, was sentenced this week to life in prison.
