Luigi Mangione Becomes A Political Prisoner

Trump’s death penalty push is a politically-fueled vendetta

Mangione marched

Luigi Mangione is now a political prisoner, with the federal government announcing its pursuit of the death penalty. The Trump administration seems to regard the slaying of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson as not just murder but terrorism, an extension of the designation to anti-corporate crimes.

This week, Attorney General Pam Bondi announced that the administration will seek the death penalty for Mangione, all but explicitly calling him a terrorist guilty of “cold blooded” murder.

This is a growing trend, labeling criminals as terrorists (even before they are convicted of a crime, which is extraordinary in itself). As with the administration’s campaign against Tesla “terrorists,” the Mangione case is a nakedly political attempt to throw the book at anti-corporate and anti-government crimes.

Britannica defines a political prisoner as “a person who is imprisoned because that person’s actions or beliefs are contrary to those of his or her government,” adding a few more details that describe Mangione well:

“What all conceptualizations and working definitions of the term political prisoner have in common is their acknowledgment of the importance of power relations, specifically between dissidents and agents of governmental authority or ruling elites.” 

A careful look at Bondi’s new statement this week on Mangione reveals several clues as to how the administration is seeking to treat anti-government protest and violence differently than standard criminal activity — namely, to label it terrorism.

AG Bondi’s press release with terrorism dogwhistles underlined

Bondi calls the murder an “assassination,” framing it as a political act. By all accounts, that is what Mangione carried out, but how does that then become “terrorism,” itself a maddeningly vague term? The answer is in the very assertion that he is a “terrorist,” which then demands the death penalty, in the administration’s eyes.

Mangione in many ways embodies exactly what MAGA hates: an Ivy League graduate who had “learned to code” and whose rhetoric about the healthcare system could have been ripped from the pages out of a Bernie Sanders speech. (In fact, the University of Pennsylvania from which Mangione graduated, just had $175 million in funding suspended by President Trump, who takes issue with its policy on transgender athletes.)

Bondi says that Mangione’s alleged act involved “substantial planning and premeditation,” another criteria that creates the aura of terrorism, rather than just conspiracy.

Then comes the most absurd claim of all, with Bondi saying that because there were “bystanders nearby,” Mangione’s actions “may have posed grave risk of death to additional persons.” (Mangione reportedly decided against using a bomb for the explicit purpose of avoiding harm to anyone else.) Under this logic, the government could choose to prosecute any arsonist or perpetrator of road rage as a terrorist. It’s hard to think of any violent crime that doesn’t hypothetically endanger bystanders.

Charging individuals with terrorism or labeling them as terrorists is inherently a political decision on the part of the government. Currently there are only three individuals in American jails awaiting execution for crimes labeled terrorism:

• Dzhokhar Tsarnaev — motivated by jihadist content, he carried out the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013, killing three people and injuring over a hundred more.

• Robert D. Bowers — motivated by anti-semitism, he carried out a mass shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018, killing 11 worshipers.

• Dylann Roof — motivated by white supremacy, he carried out a mass shooting at a black church in Charleston in 2015, killing nine worshipers. 

When former President Joe Biden commuted the death sentences of all but these three federal inmates last year, the reason he passed them up was not because of the severity of their crimes, but because of the sensitive politics involved. The 37 death sentences Biden commuted included unspeakably heinous crimes, like that of Kaboni Savage, the Philadelphia drug lord who murdered a dozen people, including four children he burned alive (!) 

What separates the three cases from the others isn’t the body count, but the political motives involved. That’s why they alone did not receive commutations; and is why Mangione is facing the death penalty today. Because in the Trump administration’s mind, murdering a CEO is a terrorist act equivalent to what al Qaeda did on 9/11.

Mangione is now a political hot potato. Despite his indictment in New York (which does not have a death penalty), the federal government still has not brought an indictment against Mangione — another extraordinary move that shows how political the case has become. How the Trump administration will somehow charge Mangione with a crime that warrants the death penalty (and whether a jury will cooperate) still remains to be seen.

What is clear though, is that the die is already cast, that the label has been applied, with the vague sense that somehow the public (or the government) was terrorized by his act. That is just step one in a campaign to portray resistance to Trump and Mr. Tesla as something other than civil disobedience or crime, the very definition of a political crime. 

— Edited by William M. Arkin