This marks the first instance the Justice Department has pursued the death penalty since Trump assumed office in January, with a promise to restart federal executions.

Bondi’s move to seek the death penalty in this prominent case highlights her dedication to advancing the president’s agenda for initiating new death penalty prosecutions, particularly in a case involving a figure who has received support from those dissatisfied with the healthcare sector.

Police said Mangione had with him a 9mm handgun that matched the one used in the shooting and other items including a fake ID and a notebook described by authorities as a “manifesto” in which they say he expressed hostility toward the health insurance industry and wealthy executives.

Among the entries in the notebook, 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 is the largest health insurer in the US, though the company said Mangione was never a client.

Mangione’s lawyer, Karen Friedman-Agnifilo, has said she would seek to suppress some of the evidence seized during his arrest. She has also taken issue with the parallel prosecutions, accusing “warring jurisdictions” of turning Mangione into a “human ping-pong ball.”

After his arrest, Mangione was whisked by plane and helicopter back to New York and walked slowly up a Manhattan pier in a highly choreographed spectacle by a throng of officers with assault rifles and a contingent that included New York City Mayor Eric Adams.

Trump signed an executive order on his first day back in office on January 20 that compels the Justice Department to seek the death penalty in federal cases where applicable. Trump’s administration carried out 13 federal executions during his first term, more than under any president in modern history.

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 US history.