When U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi declared that she would seek the death penalty against Luigi Mangione \u2014 the first capital prosecution announced during Donald Trump\u2019s second term \u2014 legal experts immediately raised the alarm. The decision was more propaganda than judicial process, with Bondi broadcasting the news in a press release and Instagram post before Mangione was even indicted.<\/p>\n
\u201cOne of my biggest questions is whether the Department of Justice followed its own policies in making this decision,\u201d Robin Maher, head of the Death Penalty Information Center, told The Intercept at the time. The answer was no. \u201cI\u2019ve been handling capital cases for over 20 years, and I\u2019ve never seen anything like it,\u201d a defense attorney in the Southern District of New York, told Vanity Fair. \u201cThere\u2019s a very detailed process that is supposed to be followed that is spelled out in the [DOJ] Justice Manual, and for the attorney general to just preempt that process is unheard of, as far as I know.\u201d<\/p>\n
It was perhaps foreseeable, then, that the capital case against the alleged murderer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson might wither under scrutiny. The presiding judge tossed the death-eligible charge against Mangione last month \u2014 another high-profile setback for an administration whose mounting authoritarianism has driven out scores of DOJ prosecutors and overwhelmed the federal courts.<\/p>\n
Yet while Mangione received frenzied attention from the start, Bondi has continued her heedless push for new death sentences mostly under the radar. To date, according to data collected by the Federal Capital Trial Project, Bondi has authorized federal prosecutors to seek the death penalty against at least 30 defendants in 24 cases.<\/p>\n
This doesn\u2019t include cases in which Bondi has promised to seek death but has not yet filed an official notification, known as a \u201cNotice of Intent.\u201d After Afghan national Rahmanullah Lakanwal allegedly gunned down two National Guard officers in Washington, D.C., Bondi vowed to \u201cdo everything in our power to seek the death penalty against that monster who should not have been in our country.\u201d But prosecutors told a federal judge last week that none of the charges they have filed allow them to seek the death penalty.<\/p>\n
Trump had always vowed to ramp up the death penalty when he returned to the White House. After carrying out 13 executions in his first term, he started his second term furious over President Joe Biden\u2019s decision to spare the lives of 37 people on federal death row. Under Biden, Attorney General Merrick Garland paused federal executions and halted new capital prosecutions almost entirely.<\/p>\n
Trump\u2019s response was a bloodthirsty executive order on Inauguration Day calling on prosecutors to seek the death penalty as often as possible. Before long, Bondi was fast-tracking capital prosecutions, running roughshod over procedural guardrails and upending the process that is supposed to govern such decisions at the Justice Department.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat we\u2019re seeing with the death penalty is exactly what we\u2019re seeing with the extrajudicial use of violence.\u201d<\/p>\n
This ham-fisted approach has largely backfired. Federal judges have taken the death penalty off the table in at least nine of Bondi\u2019s 30 individual authorizations so far \u2014 an emblem of the DOJ\u2019s recklessness. \u201cProsecutors are supposed to have a firm basis to seek the death penalty before they decide to authorize it,\u201d said Robert Dunham, director of the Death Penalty Project. \u201cWhen you see a string of cases being deauthorized because they\u2019re not legitimate death penalty cases, that tells you that prosecutors are overreaching.\u201d<\/p>\n
For its part, Trump\u2019s DOJ has argued that prosecutors have no obligation to its own protocols \u2014 and judges have no authority to enforce them. The rules and procedures that govern capital prosecutions are a mix of law and policy that Bondi is happy to dismantle, sowing chaos and curtailing defendants\u2019 rights.<\/p>\n
Trump\u2019s death penalty agenda is inextricable from the violence he has unleashed in Minneapolis and beyond. The cases pursued by Bondi reflect Trump\u2019s wish to punish immigrants, people of color, and perceived political enemies \u2014 regardless of their alleged crimes. More than two-thirds of Bondi\u2019s death penalty authorizations have been filed against defendants who are Black, Latino, Asian, or Native American, with Black people comprising the largest share. And two-thirds target jurisdictions that, like D.C., don\u2019t have the death penalty \u2014 states like Vermont and Maryland, as well as territories like Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands.<\/p>\n
But perhaps most revealing are the authorizations driven by Trump\u2019s spiteful fixation on undoing the work of his predecessor. Of the 30 defendants Bondi has sought to punish with a death sentence, 15 are people whose cases were previously handled by Biden\u2019s DOJ, in which Garland decided against seeking death. Such decisions, known as \u201cno-seeks,\u201d are filed in the vast majority of death-eligible cases. Yet Trump\u2019s DOJ has systematically sought to reverse Biden\u2019s no-seeks \u2013 an unprecedented move that has disrupted countless federal prosecutions.<\/p>\n
The push has not gone very well so far. At least eight of the 15 authorizations in which Bondi reversed a no-seek have been thrown out by the presiding judge, with more likely to follow. Most of these cases have proceeded as non-capital trials. But one is pending before a circuit court, with DOJ lawyers insisting the judge did not have the authority to rule as he did.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat we\u2019re seeing with the death penalty is exactly what we\u2019re seeing with the extrajudicial use of violence,\u201d said Dunham. \u201cThere\u2019s a belief that because the Trump administration wants to, they can do it \u2014 and the law be damned.\u201d<\/p>\n
The extraordinary push to reverse Biden\u2019s no-seeks was spelled out in a memo sent to DOJ employees on February 5, 2025, the day after Bondi was confirmed. Written as a rebuke of Biden, Bondi vowed to restore the death penalty to its rightful place. \u201cThis shameful era ends today,\u201d she wrote.<\/p>\n
The memo included a sweeping order to the DOJ\u2019s Capital Review Committee \u2014 the set of federal prosecutors who make death penalty recommendations to the attorney general. Within 120 days, the committee was to review every pending case in which Biden\u2019s DOJ had declined to pursue the death penalty. \u201cThis group shall reevaluate no-seek decisions and whether additional capital charges are appropriate,\u201d she wrote.<\/p>\n
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\n Despite Declining Support for the Death Penalty, Executions Nearly Doubled in 2025, Report Says<\/p>\n
Attorneys general have routinely reviewed cases inherited from prior administrations. In pending capital cases, a new AG has the discretion to take death off the table. Garland withdrew dozens of death penalty authorizations brought by his predecessors, while continuing prosecution of people like Robert Bowers, who was sentenced to death in 2023 for slaughtering 11 people at the Tree of Life Synagogue.<\/p>\n
Reversing a no-seek, however, is virtually unheard of. While the 1994 Federal Death Penalty Act requires prosecutors to provide a reason to withdraw a Notice of Intent, the law did not account for a scenario in which they would decide against seeking death only to later change their minds. While prosecutors can amend charges against defendants in \u201csuperseding indictments\u201d\u2014making it possible that a prosecution could become a capital case \u2014 the law holds that they must give notice that they will seek the death \u201ca reasonable time before the trial.\u201d<\/p>\n
It wasn\u2019t immediately clear how many cases fit the scope of Bondi\u2019s ordered review. But one anonymous DOJ official gave the Associated Press an estimate of 459. The order to \u201creevaluate\u201d hundreds of cases in just a few months was far-fetched \u2014 and seemingly rigged against certain people from the start. Bondi\u2019s memo instructed the Capital Review Committee to pay \u201cparticular attention\u201d to specific types of defendants: undocumented immigrants, people affiliated with \u201ccartels or transnational criminal organizations,\u201d and those whose alleged crimes occurred \u201cin Indian Country or within the federal special maritime and territorial jurisdictions.\u201d<\/p>\n
These marching orders fit neatly into Trump\u2019s broader agenda. But from a practical standpoint, reversing no-seeks would make a mess of prosecutions headed for a trial or plea deal. For lawyers, judges, and families on both sides, the result would be chaos and delay. For defendants, it would be an assault on their right to due process.<\/p>\n
Capital cases and non-capital cases proceed along distinctly different tracks from the start. People facing the death penalty are entitled to specific legal protections, including the appointment of an experienced capital defense attorney known as \u201clearned counsel,\u201d who must immediately investigate their client\u2019s life to uncover mitigating evidence \u2013 factors like mental illness, generational trauma, poverty, and childhood neglect or abuse. In death penalty cases, this evidence often decides whether a defendant lives or dies.<\/p>\n
Mitigating evidence is not reserved for sentencing, however. Under well-established DOJ protocols, prosecutors weighing the death penalty must solicit such evidence from defense lawyers. The process generally begins with the local U.S. Attorney\u2019s Office and \u2014 should prosecutors recommend the capital case move forward \u2014 culminates in a presentation before the Capital Review Committee in Washington, D.C.<\/p>\n
Most federal cases never make it this far. But the DOJ\u2019s Justice Manual makes clear that the meeting is a fundamental part of the process. \u201cNo final decision to seek the death penalty may be made if defense counsel has not been afforded an opportunity to present evidence and argument in mitigation,\u201d it reads.<\/p>\n
The whole undertaking is time-consuming for defense attorneys and costly for the courts, which must budget for the significant resources a capital case demands: the appointment of learned counsel, as well as a mitigation specialist, psychological experts, and investigators. In part for this reason, prosecutors are expected to give notice early if they plan to pursue a death sentence, by a deadline set by the presiding judge. Once the government gives word that it will not seek death, a defendant is no longer entitled to the additional resources.<\/p>\n
In the cases subjected to Bondi\u2019s memo, defense lawyers had been preparing for ordinary trials, without the legal and investigative tools afforded to capital defendants. They had not been doing what capital defense attorneys are obligated to do: prioritize the penalty phase of the trial, to prevent a client from being sentenced to die. \u201cIf you\u2019re in a no-death case and it suddenly becomes a death case, the entire life history of the defendant becomes relevant when it wasn\u2019t relevant before,\u201d Dunham explained.<\/p>\n
A proper mitigation investigation can take years. \u201cIn cases involving foreign nationals \u2014 who are being disproportionately targeted by the Trump administration \u2014 it not only takes years, it takes investigations in foreign countries,\u201d Dunham points out.<\/p>\n
Nonetheless, within days of the Bondi memo, defense teams began hearing from the Justice Department that they should prepare for a meeting with the Capital Review Committee.<\/p>\n
It would not take long for judges to push back.<\/p>\n
In May 2025, a federal judge in Nevada rejected the government\u2019s first attempt to undo a no-seek. The Biden DOJ had notified defense lawyers that they would not seek the death penalty, only for prosecutors to reverse course 12 days before the trial was set to begin. Although Bondi\u2019s memo had suggested that no-seek reversals would be based on \u201cadditional capital charges,\u201d prosecutors offered nothing to justify their move. There was no new evidence or major developments, U.S. District Judge Miranda Du wrote in a scathing order. \u201cThe government may not now unilaterally derail the course of proceedings with regard to this matter of clear procedural and constitutional weight.\u201d<\/p>\n
Soon afterwards, a Trump-appointed judge in Maryland tossed Bondi\u2019s authorizations against three men accused of committing crimes as part of MS-13. \u201cThe government assured the Defendants and this Court, in writing, that it would not seek the death penalty,\u201d wrote U.S. District Judge Stephanie Gallagher. \u201cThis Court will not cast aside decades of law, professional standards, and norms to accommodate the government\u2019s pursuit of its agenda.\u201d<\/p>\n
The judges highlighted a glaring problem with the DOJ\u2019s attempts to justify its actions. \u201cTaken to its logical conclusion,\u201d Du wrote, \u201cthe government\u2019s position would mean that defense counsel and the Court would have to continue to treat every single capital-eligible case as a death case \u2026 lest the government attempt to reverse its decision at the last minute.\u201d<\/p>\n
This would be untenable for obvious reasons. It could also bankrupt the judiciary. If a no-seek could be revoked at any moment, judges could never safely withdraw the additional resources defendants were required to receive. All death-eligible defendants would be entitled to enhanced funding and resources until trial. According to the National Association of Federal Defenders, the resulting cost would be \u201cincalculable,\u201d with the average number of cases requiring such resources ballooning from an estimated seven per year to \u201croughly 150 additional cases annually.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cJurors may be understandably hostile to a federal government that doesn\u2019t respect local views and decisions.\u201d<\/p>\n
These warnings came at an auspicious time. As Bondi ramped up prosecutions over the summer, the program that pays private court-appointed attorneys to represent indigent clients in federal cases ran out of money, leaving lawyers working without pay. Then came the federal shutdown. Those most heavily impacted were the very same legal teams facing the wave of new death penalty cases. \u201cFederal capital defense lawyers are under tremendous pressure to secure the time, resources, and funding they need to adequately defend these cases,\u201d said Maher, the director of the Death Penalty Information Center.<\/p>\n
The situation was especially senseless given how few capital prosecutions actually culminate in a death sentence \u2014 let alone an execution. Public opinion has largely turned against capital punishment, with juries increasingly refusing to send people to death row. \u201cSecuring federal death sentences will be a very difficult task given the low level of public support for the death penalty and rising concerns about federal overreach and abuse,\u201d Maher said. It will be harder still in places that have rejected capital punishment. \u201cJurors may be understandably hostile to a federal government that doesn\u2019t respect local views and decisions.\u201d<\/p>\n
All of this made the Trump DOJ\u2019s targeting of U.S. territories especially vexing. In Puerto Rico, whose Constitution banned capital punishment more than 70 years ago, U.S. prosecutors have failed to win a single death sentence despite some 19 authorizations over three decades. Yet Bondi, who has authorized at least one new death case in Puerto Rico, is determined to expand such efforts to a jurisdiction that has never seen a death penalty case: the U.S. Virgin Islands.<\/p>\n
One year before the Bondi memo, federal prosecutors filed a no-seek in the case of Richardson Dangleben Jr., charged with killing a St. Croix police detective on the Fourth of July. Garland\u2019s DOJ \u201cintends to proceed with either a non-capital trial or plea agreement in this matter and will not seek the death penalty,\u201d the local U.S. Attorney wrote in February 2024. This confirmed what prosecutors had told Dangleben\u2019s defense attorney, Federal Public Defender Matthew Campbell, more than six months earlier. At the time, this was to be expected. The U.S. Virgin Islands, Campbell would later point out in an affidavit, \u201chad no history of authorizing or carrying out capital sentences.\u201d<\/p>\n
In February 2025, however, Campbell got word that federal prosecutors might seek the death penalty after all. The presiding judge, U.S. District Judge Robert Molloy, swiftly appointed learned counsel, who warned that Dangleben\u2019s defense had already been severely compromised. \u201cIf this were a capital case from its inception, we would have hired a mitigation specialist and we would have been preparing a mitigation packet for the Department of Justice from day one,\u201d she said in a phone conference. Instead \u2013 more than a year and a half after prosecutors said that they would not seek the death penalty \u2013 the lawyers were scrambling to present before the Capital Review Committee in a matter of weeks.<\/p>\n
In May, the DOJ filed a Notice of Intent to seek the death penalty.<\/p>\n
The authorizations in the Virgin Islands didn\u2019t stop there. Over the next few months, the government filed Notices of Intent against two more men, co-defendants Enock Cole and Jiovoni Smith. As in Dangleben\u2019s case, prosecutors had previously said that they would not seek death only to reverse course after Trump returned to office. Even more shocking was an authorization in a third Virgin Islands case, that of Rosniel Diaz-Bautista. In his case, the DOJ had apparently decided to seek a death sentence \u201cwithout granting the defense any opportunity to submit mitigating evidence, make a mitigation presentation, or otherwise participate in the capital-authorization process,\u201d as Campbell wrote in a court filing. This was \u201cwholly unprecedented in the thirty-plus year history of the modern federal death penalty.\u201d<\/p>\n
Judges struck down all four authorizations. Ruling in Dangleben\u2019s case, Molloy \u2014 a Trump appointee \u2014 echoed the federal judges who had previously refused to allow the DOJ to reverse its no-seeks. Prosecutors had said \u201cunequivocally\u201d that they would \u201cproceed with either a non-capital trial or plea agreement in this matter,\u201d he wrote. The trial \u201cwill proceed as a non-death penalty case.\u201d<\/p>\n
But prosecutors appealed Molloy\u2019s ruling to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, which took the case. Just days before Dangleben\u2019s trial was set to start, Molloy abruptly canceled it.<\/p>\n
Luigi Mangione appears in Manhattan Criminal Court for an evidence hearing, Tuesday, Dec. 9, 2025, in New York. \u00a0Photo: William Farrington\/New York Post via AP, Pool <\/p>\n
In December, lawyers on both sides of Dangleben\u2019s case appeared before a panel of\u00a0Third Circuit judges in St. Croix for oral argument. It was the first time an order rejecting one of Bondi\u2019s no-seek reversals was being tested before an appellate court. The judges have yet to rule. But if the DOJ prevails, it would potentially turn decades of case law on its head. <\/p>\n
The National Association of Federal Defenders filed an amicus brief in support of Dangleben, warning that the government was trying to erode the authority of district courts with arguments that were \u201cnovel and extreme.\u201d DOJ lawyers were increasingly claiming that judges lacked the power to enforce the deadlines prosecutors were supposed to follow when deciding whether to seek death \u2014 or to hold them to those decisions.<\/p>\n
The panel seemed perplexed by the whole situation. \u201cDo you have any cases where a no-seek notice was filed, whether formal or informal, and then the case proceeded to trial as a death case?\u201d a judge asked William Glasser, one of two lawyers representing the Trump administration.<\/p>\n
\u201cYour Honor, I\u2019m not aware of any off the top of my head,\u201d Glasser replied.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo this would be the first,\u201d the judge said. He could see why some prosecutors might wish to change their minds after filing a no-seek, say, upon uncovering new evidence. But that didn\u2019t happen in this case.<\/p>\n
Glasser pushed back. The government \u201creevaluated\u201d the evidence, he said, and decided it merited death after all. \u201cWas it really a reevaluation?\u201d another judge asked. \u201cOr was it more a policy change?\u201d<\/p>\n
Glasser insisted that the DOJ\u2019s actions were not as disruptive as they appeared. The panel seemed skeptical. \u201cDistrict court judges have not only the right but the duty to set up an orderly process,\u201d one judge said. In Dangleben\u2019s case, prosecutors filed their Notice of Intent just four months before the trial date.<\/p>\n
\u201cFour and a half months, your Honor,\u201d Glasser clarified. But in any given case, he maintained, a trial date could simply be pushed back.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s a level of game theory and gamesmanship here that seems to be inimical to what we want in trials generally and especially homicide trials,\u201d one judge remarked. Perhaps more concerning, there was no \u201climiting principle\u201d to the government\u2019s position: The DOJ was essentially saying it could change its mind on a whim and everyone else would have to adapt.<\/p>\n
Glasser suggested that courts could just appeal to the government\u2019s willingness to be reasonable. \u201cI\u2019ve seen district judges saying to the government, \u2018Look, tell me if you\u2019re going to [bring a superseding indictment]. I need to know that for planning purposes.\u2019 And that\u2019s perfectly legitimate.\u201dCan judges really count on the government to honor such a claim?Yes, Glasser said.The judge asked the obvious question: Then why can\u2019t they count on the government when it says, \u201cWe\u2019re not seeking the death penalty?\u201dGlasser gave a lengthy response. But the real answer was obvious to anyone who has watched Trump\u2019s assault on the courts. The real answer is that the DOJ can\u2019t be trusted at all.
\nThe post Pam Bondi Is Pushing Death Sentences for People Spared By Her Predecessor appeared first on The Intercept.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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