cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/7617949
cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/26473
When U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi declared that she would seek the death penalty against Luigi Mangione — the first capital prosecution announced during Donald Trump’s second term — 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.
“One of my biggest questions is whether the Department of Justice followed its own policies in making this decision,” Robin Maher, head of the Death Penalty Information Center, told The Intercept at the time. The answer was no. “I’ve been handling capital cases for over 20 years, and I’ve never seen anything like it,” a defense attorney in the Southern District of New York, told Vanity Fair. “There’s 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.”
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 — another high-profile setback for an administration whose mounting authoritarianism has driven out scores of DOJ prosecutors and overwhelmed the federal courts.
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.
This doesn’t include cases in which Bondi has promised to seek death but has not yet filed an official notification, known as a “Notice of Intent.” After Afghan national Rahmanullah Lakanwal allegedly gunned down two National Guard officers in Washington, D.C., Bondi vowed to “do everything in our power to seek the death penalty against that monster who should not have been in our country.” But prosecutors told a federal judge last week that none of the charges they have filed allow them to seek the death penalty.
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’s 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.
Trump’s 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.
“What we’re seeing with the death penalty is exactly what we’re seeing with the extrajudicial use of violence.”
This ham-fisted approach has largely backfired. Federal judges have taken the death penalty off the table in at least nine of Bondi’s 30 individual authorizations so far — an emblem of the DOJ’s recklessness. “Prosecutors are supposed to have a firm basis to seek the death penalty before they decide to authorize it,” said Robert Dunham, director of the Death Penalty Project. “When you see a string of cases being deauthorized because they’re not legitimate death penalty cases, that tells you that prosecutors are overreaching.”
For its part, Trump’s DOJ has argued that prosecutors have no obligation to its own protocols — 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’ rights.
Trump’s death penalty agenda is inextricable from the violence he has unleashed in Minneapolis and beyond. The cases pursued by Bondi reflect Trump’s wish to punish immigrants, people of color, and perceived political enemies — regardless of their alleged crimes. More than two-thirds of Bondi’s 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’t have the death penalty — states like Vermont and Maryland, as well as territories like Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands.
But perhaps most revealing are the authorizations driven by Trump’s 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’s DOJ, in which Garland decided against seeking death*.* Such decisions, known as “no-seeks,” are filed in the vast majority of death-eligible cases. Yet Trump’s DOJ has systematically sought to reverse Biden’s no-seeks – an unprecedented move that has disrupted countless federal prosecutions.
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.
“What we’re seeing with the death penalty is exactly what we’re seeing with the extrajudicial use of violence,” said Dunham. “There’s a belief that because the Trump administration wants to, they can do it — and the law be damned.”
The extraordinary push to reverse Biden’s 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. “This shameful era ends today,” she wrote.
The memo included a sweeping order to the DOJ’s Capital Review Committee — 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’s DOJ had declined to pursue the death penalty. “This group shall reevaluate no-seek decisions and whether additional capital charges are appropriate,” she wrote.
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Related
Despite Declining Support for the Death Penalty, Executions Nearly Doubled in 2025, Report Says](https://theintercept.com/2025/12/15/death-penalty-executions-2025/)
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.
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 “superseding indictments”—making it possible that a prosecution could become a capital case — the law holds that they must give notice that they will seek the death “a reasonable time before the trial.”
It wasn’t immediately clear how many cases fit the scope of Bondi’s ordered review. But one anonymous DOJ official gave the Associated Press an estimate of 459. The order to “reevaluate” hundreds of cases in just a few months was far-fetched — and seemingly rigged against certain people from the start. Bondi’s memo instructed the Capital Review Committee to pay “particular attention” to specific types of defendants: undocumented immigrants, people affiliated with “cartels or transnational criminal organizations,” and those whose alleged crimes occurred “in Indian Country or within the federal special maritime and territorial jurisdictions.”
These marching orders fit neatly into Trump’s 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.
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 “learned counsel,” who must immediately investigate their client’s life to uncover mitigating evidence – 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.
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’s Office and — should prosecutors recommend the capital case move forward — culminates in a presentation before the Capital Review Committee in Washington, D.C.
Most federal cases never make it this far. But the DOJ’s Justice Manual makes clear that the meeting is a fundamental part of the process. “No 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,” it reads.
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.
In the cases subjected to Bondi’s 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. “If you’re in a no-death case and it suddenly becomes a death case, the entire life history of the defendant becomes relevant when it wasn’t relevant before,” Dunham explained.
A proper mitigation investigation can take years. “In cases involving foreign nationals — who are being disproportionately targeted by the Trump administration — it not only takes years, it takes investigations in foreign countries,” Dunham points out.
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.
It would not take long for judges to push back.
In May 2025, a federal judge in Nevada rejected the government’s 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’s memo had suggested that no-seek reversals would be based on “additional capital charges,” 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. “The government may not now unilaterally derail the course of proceedings with regard to this matter of clear procedural and constitutional weight.”
Soon afterwards, a Trump-appointed judge in Maryland tossed Bondi’s authorizations against three men accused of committing crimes as part of MS-13. “The government assured the Defendants and this Court, in writing, that it would not seek the death penalty,” wrote U.S. District Judge Stephanie Gallagher. “This Court will not cast aside decades of law, professional standards, and norms to accommodate the government’s pursuit of its agenda.”
The judges highlighted a glaring problem with the DOJ’s attempts to justify its actions. “Taken to its logical conclusion,” Du wrote, “the government’s position would mean that defense counsel and the Court would have to continue to treat every single capital-eligible case as a death case … lest the government attempt to reverse its decision at the last minute.”
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 “incalculable,” with the average number of cases requiring such resources ballooning from an estimated seven per year to “roughly 150 additional cases annually.”
“Jurors may be understandably hostile to a federal government that doesn’t respect local views and decisions.”
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. “Federal capital defense lawyers are under tremendous pressure to secure the time, resources, and funding they need to adequately defend these cases,” said Maher, the director of the Death Penalty Information Center.
The situation was especially senseless given how few capital prosecutions actually culminate in a death sentence — let alone an execution. Public opinion has largely turned against capital punishment, with juries increasingly refusing to send people to death row. “Securing 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,” Maher said. It will be harder still in places that have rejected capital punishment. “Jurors may be understandably hostile to a federal government that doesn’t respect local views and decisions.”
All of this made the Trump DOJ’s 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.
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’s DOJ “intends to proceed with either a non-capital trial or plea agreement in this matter and will not seek the death penalty,” the local U.S. Attorney wrote in February 2024. This confirmed what prosecutors had told Dangleben’s 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, “had no history of authorizing or carrying out capital sentences.”
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’s defense had already been severely compromised. “If 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,” she said in a phone conference. Instead – more than a year and a half after prosecutors said that they would not seek the death penalty – the lawyers were scrambling to present before the Capital Review Committee in a matter of weeks.
In May, the DOJ filed a Notice of Intent to seek the death penalty.
The authorizations in the Virgin Islands didn’t 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’s 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 “without granting the defense any opportunity to submit mitigating evidence, make a mitigation presentation, or otherwise participate in the capital-authorization process,” as Campbell wrote in a court filing. This was “wholly unprecedented in the thirty-plus year history of the modern federal death penalty.”
Judges struck down all four authorizations. Ruling in Dangleben’s case, Molloy — a Trump appointee — echoed the federal judges who had previously refused to allow the DOJ to reverse its no-seeks. Prosecutors had said “unequivocally” that they would “proceed with either a non-capital trial or plea agreement in this matter,” he wrote. The trial “will proceed as a non-death penalty case.”
But prosecutors appealed Molloy’s ruling to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, which took the case. Just days before Dangleben’s trial was set to start, Molloy abruptly canceled it.
Luigi Mangione appears in Manhattan Criminal Court for an evidence hearing, Tuesday, Dec. 9, 2025, in New York. Photo: William Farrington/New York Post via AP, Pool
In December, lawyers on both sides of Dangleben’s case appeared before a panel of Third Circuit judges in St. Croix for oral argument. It was the first time an order rejecting one of Bondi’s 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.
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 “novel and extreme.” 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 — or to hold them to those decisions.
The panel seemed perplexed by the whole situation. “Do 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?” a judge asked William Glasser, one of two lawyers representing the Trump administration.
“Your Honor, I’m not aware of any off the top of my head,” Glasser replied.
“So this would be the first,” 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’t happen in this case.
Glasser pushed back. The government “reevaluated” the evidence, he said, and decided it merited death after all. “Was it really a reevaluation?” another judge asked. “Or was it more a policy change?”
Glasser insisted that the DOJ’s actions were not as disruptive as they appeared. The panel seemed skeptical. “District court judges have not only the right but the duty to set up an orderly process,” one judge said. In Dangleben’s case, prosecutors filed their Notice of Intent just four months before the trial date.
“Four and a half months, your Honor,” Glasser clarified. But in any given case, he maintained, a trial date could simply be pushed back.
“There’s a level of game theory and gamesmanship here that seems to be inimical to what we want in trials generally and especially homicide trials,” one judge remarked. Perhaps more concerning, there was no “limiting principle” to the government’s position: The DOJ was essentially saying it could change its mind on a whim and everyone else would have to adapt.
Glasser suggested that courts could just appeal to the government’s willingness to be reasonable. “I’ve seen district judges saying to the government, ‘Look, tell me if you’re going to [bring a superseding indictment]. I need to know that for planning purposes.’ And that’s perfectly legitimate.”
Can judges really count on the government to honor such a claim?
Yes, Glasser said.
The judge asked the obvious question: Then why can’t they count on the government when it says, “We’re not seeking the death penalty?”
Glasser gave a lengthy response. But the real answer was obvious to anyone who has watched Trump’s assault on the courts. The real answer is that the DOJ can’t be trusted at all.
The post Pam Bondi Is Pushing Death Sentences for People Spared By Her Predecessor appeared first on The Intercept.
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