In December, Luigi Mangione was arrested for shooting health insurance executive Brian Thompson. Last week, Trump’s attorney general, Pam Bondi, announced that she was seeking the death penalty. It’s a highly unusual announcement, since Mangione hasn’t even been indicted yet on a federal level. (He has been indicted in Manhattan.) By intervening in this high-profile case, the Trump administration has made clear that it believes that CEOs are especially important people whose deaths need to be swiftly and mercilessly avenged.
No, they’re not.
They’re not discussing what the appropriate penalties should be—which, by the way, is typically done at the end of a trial during the sentencing phase, after all evidence has been presented and a guilty verdict has been delivered, because punishment is supposed to be reflective of the evidence presented—they’re saying that they’ve already decided that the target penalty is death.
That’s a clear nod that they want to make an example, a concept divorced from justice.