Attorneys for Luigi Mangione asked a judge to stop federal prosecutors from seeking the death penalty against their client, saying the U.S. government “intends to kill Mr. Mangione as a political stunt.”
The motion filed Friday in the U.S. District Court of the Southern District said U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi ordered the death penalty to “carry out President Trump’s agenda to stop violent crime and Make America Safe Again.”
Mangione, 26, who faces state murder and terrorism charges in New York, along with federal murder and stalking charges, is accused of murdering United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson last year in New York City.
The death penalty is ethically wrong to me because you can’t trust the system 100%, even in the best case. Death row inmates have been exonerated with additional evidence, or just better processing of existing evidence, or other reasons. Unless the judicial system is 100% accurate (which, spoiler, it neither is nor possibly can be), you introduce the possibility of executing innocent people, which should be abhorrent to everyone.
I think it’s unethical to force someone to be locked up in prison for the rest of their life without 100% certainty also.
Sure, but at least if they’re wrongly incarcerated you can free them and pay damages. You can’t undo death.
I don’t disagree with you, I just don’t think the line for life in prison and death should exist under 100% certain, which is incredibly rare. I’m not sure of a practical solution but I’ve had rough 5-10 year stretches in my life and they are traumatic. No amount of ‘damages’ fixes that or makes someone whole. Sometimes I wonder if people really know what it’s like to be locked up for 5-10+ years when they go off about a sentence being too short. Life without parole is a death sentence just the same as the chair is.
No system is perfect, any attempt at justice will either end with dangerous, guilty people walking free or innocent people incarcerated. The Justice system needs reform but there’s no easy solution.
I am against the death penalty too. I absolutely agree with your reasoning, but it’s not my primary motivating factor. For me, as callous as it may be, I’d rather that taxpayers not foot the bill for the legal process involved with trying to put someone on death row, and then the subsequent legal process of flipping the switch, pulling the trigger, injecting the needle… whatever. The expense to the taxpayers is of a greater cost than lifetime incarceration.
The death penalty is hypocritical too. I cannot get on board with the lack of logic surrounding, “Killing someone is a crime, and you did that so now we’re going to kill you.”
Your last point hinges on a false equivalency. Imprisonment is also a crime, but we let the government imprison dangerous people for public safety. It’s different when the government does it.
Obviously the death penalty is a different situation, but your logic doesn’t hold up in either case.
To be clear, I don’t support the death penalty. But people on the Internet seem to hate it when I play devil’s advocate to sharpen an argument.
For my book report I did in the mid 1990s I remember citing at least two recent examples and a number of less recent examples.
I almost agree, but there are always those people who have earned their death penalty.
I think we use it way too often, and often for terrible reasons, like to pump up the law & order cred for some scummy DA with ambitions for higher office. But sometimes there is a crime so bad, that the only appropriate response is to remove them from ALL society. Even prisoners shouldnt have to abide their presence among them.
So i want to preseve it for only the most heinous forms of murder, like serial or mass murder, torture murders, and definitely the deliberate murder of children, but only when the evidence is so overwhelming that there is no doubt of guilt. They must be caught in the act, confess everything, with lots of corroborating evidence and testimony, etc. It should NEVER be applied for anything other than murder. Not for rape, treason, etc.
Even with all of that, it should only be used a handful of times in a decade, and only after a full review of the evidence and the case.
But just some cop testifying that he claims he saw one guy kill another? Nuh-uh. People shouldn’t be getting death penalties based on stuff like police or jail-house snitch testimony, or “circumstantial” evidence. Or any police testimony, for that matter. They are proven, enthusiastic liars.
Given what we know about the murder of this CSKfP (Corporate Serial Killer for Profit), Luigi and Death Penalty shouldn’t be used in the same sentence