Defense attorneys for the Ivy League graduate charged with gunning down UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on a street in midtown Manhattan, Luigi Mangione, asked a federal judge to block the Justice Department from seeking the death penalty for their 26-year-old client.

In her motion, filed late on Friday, defense attorney Karen Friedman Agnifilo argued that the attorney general’s decision to seek the death penalty for Mr. Mangione violated his due process rights, did not follow proper legal protocol, prejudiced the jury pool and was being used as a “political stunt.” 

On April 1, the attorney general, Pam Bondi, released a statement saying, “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. After careful consideration, I have 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 defense fiercely criticized that Mr. Mangione was being called, by name, a murderer by the attorney general when he is in fact innocent until proven guilty, and has not yet been indicted, “let alone convicted.” 

Mr. Mangione is currently being held in a federal detention centre in New York, the Metropolitan Detention Center Brooklyn, on a criminal complaint, charging him with four federal counts, including stalking and murder through use of a firearm, which is death sentence eligible. He is still awaiting his federal indictment. 

He also faces charges from the state of New York, and as of now, prosecutors agreed that his state trial will take place before the federal trial. New York, however, can’t sentence Mr. Mangione to death since the state no longer has the death penalty. 

Mr. Mangione, a tech enthusiast who comes from an influential real estate family in Towson, Maryland, outside Baltimore, and was his high school’s valedictorian before earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the University of Pennsylvania, faces charges in three separate jurisdictions for allegedly gunning down Mr. Thompson last December. 

The executive, a Minnesota father of two, was a senior executive at the UnitedHealth Group, the country’s largest health insurance company that, like other large health insurers, has come under criticism for how it handles claims from its members. Mr. Thompson was visiting New York on business on December 4, and was on his way to an investor conference in the early morning hours, when Mr. Mangione allegedly shot him from behind on a midtown sidewalk, in front of the New York Hilton. 

After a five-day manhunt, during which surveillance pictures of the alleged murderer were circulated on national media and flooded the internet, Mr. Mangione was arrested at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania, where an employee called the police after a customer had recognized the young man, who had removed his face mask to eat.

According to police reports, Mr. Mangione carried a 9-millimeter 3D-printed handgun, two ammunition magazines, multiple live cartridges, a homemade silencer, and a fake New Jersey drivers license, which he is believed to have used to check into a hostel in Manhattan’s Bloomingdale neighborhood where he stayed before he murdered the executive.

The suspect was extradited to New York in late December and brought to court with great fanfare by a phalanx of law enforcement officers. Besides facing gun possession and other charges in Pennsylvania, Mr. Mangione is being prosecuted for murder in New York both in federal and in state court.   

The state case was brought by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg. The 11-count indictment includes charges of murder in the first-degree, the most serious homicide offense in New York State, which is punishable by 20 years to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Mr. Mangione pleaded not guilty to all charges in Pennsylvania and in New York. 

Meanwhile, the federal charges have not yet been brought before a grand jury and an indictment against Mr. Mangione has not yet been served. But Ms. Bondi, who stated she had carefully considered the charges, already announced she will be seeking capital punishment. 

On Friday, the defense described this decision as “political, arbitrary, capricious, a breach of established death penalty protocol” that has now “indelibly prejudiced this process.”      

“The stakes could not be higher. The United States government intends to kill Mr. Mangione as a political stunt,” Ms. Agnifilo wrote in her motion. “Mr. Mangione’s counsel asked for three months to prepare a fulsome mitigation submission to the Department of Justice’s Capital Committee and was ignored.”

Ms. Agnifilo argued that Ms. Bondi’s decision was “explicitly and unapologetically political” because, as the attorney wrote, the “basis” for her “directive” was to “to carry out President Trump’s agenda to stop violent crime and Make America Safe Again.” Thus, “the driving factor for the Attorney General ordering the death penalty was politics and not the facts of the case.” 

Mr. Trump, in one of his first official acts as president, issued an executive order declaring his intention to aggressively pursue death penalty prosecutions. This came after President Biden, in his final weeks in office, commuted the death sentences of 34 of 37 condemned murderers on federal death row, which outraged several of the victim’s families and Mr. Trump himself. 

Ms. Bondi was a strong supporter of the death penalty as attorney general of Florida and in 2013, notoriously rescheduled an execution so she could attend her own fundraiser. 

Mr. Mangione’s defense wrote in their Friday evening filing that besides her press release, Ms. Bondi also posted her decision on Instagram and X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, and appeared on Fox News Sunday on April 6, where she said she had received death threats for seeking capital punishment for Mr. Mangione. This form of public display, the defense argued, “prejudiced the grand jury pool” and “corrupted the grand jury process.” 

The interim US attorney for the Southern District of New York, Matthew Podolsky, whom Ms. Bondi said she would direct to seek the death penalty, will, most likely, answer the defense’s motion.  

Mr. Mangione is scheduled to appear in federal court on April 18.