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.
Executing the guilty should be abhorrent to everyone.
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 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 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
That’s already the exact bar to clear for every guilty conviction.
Circumstantial evidence can clear the bar, I’m talking about standard that is higher than that. That has to be necessary if were going to take a life.
I wonder what would clear the bar for sanctioned killing, then.
Witnesses can be enemies of the accused (especially if they’re police), witness memory is notoriously unreliable, photo and video evidence can be faked, DNA only proves someone was present at the crime scene, not what they did, and confessions can be forced.
There is literally no way to prove someone’s guilt 100% unless the jury was present during the murder.
Several years back, there was a case of two knuckleheads who were in prison together, and when they got out, they planned a home invasion.
They broke in, beat the crap out of the husband/father, and chained him to a pole in the basement. Then they tied up the mom and two teenage daughters. They terrorized them all night, raped the younger daughter. In the morning, one asshole took the mother to the bank, and forced her to withdraw a bunch of money from the teller. The mother tried to attract the teller’s attention with her eyes and facial expressions, but the teller didn’t pick up on it.
He took her home, and tied her up again. Then they poured gasoline around the house, including pouring it across one of the girls, tied to her bed. Then they set it on fire.
The husband, smelling the smoke, finally broke loose, crawled out a window and ran next door to call the police. The cops got there quick (really nice neighborhood), and arrived just as the two idiots burst out the front door of the burning house. They were apprehended on the front lawn, smelling like gasoline, and immediately started blaming the entire debacle on each other, as if it made a difference.
The mother and two daughters died in the fire. At least one of the girls had broken loose, but died of smoke inhalation before reaching the steps to downstairs. The husband survived his injuries, and positively identified both dickheads. There was absolutely no doubt that these guys were 1000% guilty. There was no way that some slick defense lawyer was going to be able to make any kind of case for another suspect, a coerced confession, a sketchy identification, poor police procedure, etc.
This happened in Connecticut, which didn’t have the death penalty. At the time, I spoke with numerous Connecticut residents who were ALL willing to make an exception for these two scumbags.
This is the kind of evidence I’m talking about. Sure, many crimes have some ambiguity, and wouldn’t be eligible for the death penalty under my suggested protocols, but that wasnt the case with these guys. They were caught on the scene, and immediately confessed to the crime, as their victims were dying in the fire, and then were identified by the one surviving victim. This wasn’t just beyond reasonable doubt, this was beyond ANY sort of doubt. These guys earned their death penalties, and it’s a shame they can’t be carried out.
You’re pointing out all the reasons where a prosecution could go wrong and potentially condemn an innocent person, and I agree with ALL of them. But occasionally there is the combination of a particularly heinous murder AND the lack of any possible doubt at all, and these are the crimes I’m suggesting should be eligible for the death penalty. They are very rare, and like I first said, would probably only happen a handful of times in an entire decade.