Federal prosecutors to seek death penalty for Luigi Mangione in UnitedHealthcare CEO's killing

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Federal prosecutors to seek death penalty for Luigi Mangione in UnitedHealthcare CEO's killing

2025-04-02 03:45 Last Updated At：03:51

NEW YORK (AP) — U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi said Tuesday that she has directed prosecutors to seek the death penalty against Luigi Mangione in the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, following through on the president's campaign promise to vigorously pursue capital punishment.

It is the first time the Justice Department has sought to bring the death penalty since President Donald Trump returned to office in January with a vow to resume federal executions after they were halted under the previous administration.

“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,” Bondi said in a statement. She described Thompson’s killing as “an act of political violence.”

Mangione, a 26-year-old Ivy League graduate from a prominent Maryland real estate family, faces separate federal and state murder charges after authorities say he gunned down Thompson, 50, outside a Manhattan hotel on Dec. 4 as the executive arrived for UnitedHealthcare’s annual investor conference.

Mangione’s lawyer, Karen Friedman Agnifilo, said Tuesday that in seeking the death penalty “the Justice Department has moved from the dysfunctional to the barbaric.”

Mangione “is caught in a high-stakes game of tug-of-war between state and federal prosecutors, except the trophy is a young man’s life,” Friedman Agnifilo said in a statement, vowing to fight all charges against him.

The killing and ensuing five-day manhunt leading to Mangione's arrest rattled the business community, with some health insurers hastily switching to remote work or online shareholder meetings. It also galvanized health insurance critics — some of whom have rallied around Mangione as a stand-in for frustrations over coverage denials and hefty medical bills.

Surveillance video showed a masked gunman shooting Thompson from behind. Police say the words “delay,” “deny” and “depose” were scrawled on the ammunition, mimicking a phrase commonly used to describe insurer tactics to avoid paying claims.

Mangione's federal charges include murder through use of a firearm, which carries the possibility of the death penalty. The state charges carry a maximum punishment of life in prison. Mangione has pleaded not guilty to a state indictment and has not yet been required to enter a plea on the federal charges.

Prosecutors have said the two cases will proceed on parallel tracks, with the state case expected to go to trial first. It wasn't immediately clear if Bondi's announcement will change the order.

Mangione was arrested Dec. 9 in Altoona, Pennsylvania, about 230 miles (about 370 kilometers) west of New York City and whisked to Manhattan by plane and helicopter.

Police said Mangione had a 9mm handgun that matched the one used in the shooting and other items including a notebook in which they say he expressed hostility toward the health insurance industry and wealthy executives.

Among the entries, prosecutors said, was one from August 2024 that said “the target is insurance” because “it checks every box” and one from October that describes an intent to “wack” an insurance company CEO. UnitedHealthcare, the largest U.S. health insurer, has said Mangione was never a client.

Mangione's lawyer has said she would seek to suppress some of the evidence.

Former President Joe Biden’s Justice Department filed the federal case against Mangione but left it to Trump and his administration to decide whether to seek the death penalty. Because the federal case had been taking a backseat to the state case, federal prosecutors have yet to seek a grand jury indictment, which is required for capital cases.

Trump oversaw an unprecedented run of 13 executions at the end of his first term and has been an outspoken proponent of expanding capital punishment. Trump signed an executive order on his first day back in office on Jan. 20 that compels the Justice Department to seek the death penalty in federal cases where applicable.

Bondi’s order comes weeks after she lifted a Biden-era moratorium on federal executions.

Biden campaigned on a pledge to work toward abolishing federal capital punishment but took no major steps to that end. While Attorney General Merrick Garland halted federal executions in 2021, Biden's Justice Department at the same time fought vigorously to maintain the sentences of death row inmates in many cases.

In his final weeks in office, Biden commuted the sentences of 37 of the 40 people on federal death row, converting their punishments to life in prison.

The three inmates that remain are Dylann Roof, who carried out the 2015 racist slayings of nine Black members of Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina; 2013 Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev; and Robert Bowers, who fatally shot 11 congregants at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in 2018, the deadliest antisemitic attack in U.S history.

Markets plunge with S&P 500 down 6% and Dow down 2,200 as their worst crisis since COVID deepens

2025-04-05 04:17 Last Updated At：04:20

NEW YORK (AP) — Wall Street’s worst crisis since COVID slammed into a higher, scarier gear Friday.

The S&P 500 lost 6% after China matched President Donald Trump’s big raise in tariffs announced earlier this week. The move increased the stakes in a trade war that could end with a recession that hurts everyone. Not even a better-than-expected report on the U.S. job market, which is usually the economic highlight of each month, was enough to stop the slide.

The drop closed the worst week for the S&P 500 since March 2020, when the pandemic crashed the economy. The Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged 2,231 points, or 5.5% Friday, and the Nasdaq composite tumbled 5.8% to pull more than 20% below its record set in December.

So far there have been few, if any, winners in financial markets from the trade war. Stocks for all but 12 of the 500 companies that make up the S&P 500 index fell Friday. The price of crude oil tumbled to its lowest level since 2021. Other basic building blocks for economic growth, such as copper, also saw prices slide on worries the trade war will weaken the global economy.

China’s response to U.S. tariffs caused an immediate acceleration of losses in markets worldwide. The Commerce Ministry in Beijing said it would respond to the 34% tariffs imposed by the U.S. on imports from China with its own 34% tariff on imports of all U.S. products beginning April 10. The United States and China are the world’s two largest economies.

Markets briefly recovered some of their losses after the release of Friday morning’s U.S. jobs report, which said employers accelerated their hiring by more last month than economists expected. It’s the latest signal that the U.S. job market has remained relatively solid through the start of 2025, and it’s been a linchpin keeping the U.S. economy out of a recession.

But that jobs data was backward looking, and the fear hitting financial markets is about what’s to come.

“The world has changed, and the economic conditions have changed,” said Rick Rieder, chief investment officer of global fixed income at BlackRock.

The central question looking ahead is: Will the trade war cause a global recession? If it does, stock prices will likely need to come down even more than they have already. The S&P 500 is down 17.4% from its record set in February.

Trump seemed unfazed. From Mar-a-Lago, his private club in Florida, he headed to his golf course a few miles away after writing on social media that “THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO GET RICH.”

The Federal Reserve could cushion the blow of tariffs on the economy by cutting interest rates, which can encourage companies and households to borrow and spend. But the Fed may have less freedom to move than it would like.

Fed Chair Jerome Powell said Friday that tariffs could also drive up expectations for inflation. That could prove more damaging than high inflation itself, because it can drive a vicious cycle of behavior that only worsens inflation. U.S. households have already said they’re bracing for sharp increases to their bills.

“Our obligation is to keep longer-term inflation expectations well anchored and to make certain that a one-time increase in the price level does not become an ongoing inflation problem,” Powell said.

That could indicate a hesitance to cut rates because lower rates can give inflation more fuel.

Much will depend on how long Trump’s tariffs stick and what kind of retaliations other countries deliver. Some of Wall Street is holding onto hope that Trump will lower the tariffs after prying out some “wins” from other countries following negotiations.

Trump has given mixed signals on that. On Friday, he said an official from Vietnam said his country already “wants to cut their Tariffs down to ZERO if they are able to make an agreement with the U.S.” Trump also criticized China’s retaliation, saying on his Truth Social platform that “CHINA PLAYED IT WRONG, THEY PANICKED - THE ONE THING THEY CANNOT AFFORD TO DO!”

Trump has said Americans may feel “some pain” because of tariffs, but he has also said the long-term goals, including getting more manufacturing jobs back to the United States, are worth it. On Thursday, he likened the situation to a medical operation, where the U.S. economy is the patient.

“For investors looking at their portfolios, it could have felt like an operation performed without anesthesia,” said Brian Jacobsen, chief economist at Annex Wealth Management.

But Jacobsen also said the next surprise for investors could be how quickly tariffs get negotiated down. “The speed of recovery will depend on how, and how quickly, officials negotiate,” he said.

On Wall Street, stocks of companies that do lots of business in China fell to some of the sharpest losses.

DuPont dropped 12.7% after China said its regulators are launching an anti-trust investigation into DuPont China group, a subsidiary of the chemical giant. It’s one of several measures targeting American companies and in retaliation for the U.S. tariffs.

GE Healthcare got 12% of its revenue last year from the China region, and it fell 16%.

All told, the S&P 500 fell 322.44 points to 5,074.08. The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 2,231.07 to 38,314.86, and the Nasdaq composite fell 962.82 to 15,587.79.

In stock markets abroad, Germany’s DAX lost 5%, France’s CAC 40 dropped 4.3% and Japan’s Nikkei 225 fell 2.8%.

In the bond market, Treasury yields fell, but they pared their drops following Powell’s cautious statements about inflation. The yield on the 10-year Treasury fell to 4.01% from 4.06% late Thursday and from roughly 4.80% early this year. It had gone below 3.90% in the morning.

AP Writers Jiang Junzhe, Huizhong Wu and Matt Ott contributed.