On event date 2026-01-30, a New York federal judge dismissed murder and weapons charges against Luigi Mangione in the killing of UnitedHealthcare chief executive Brian Thompson, removing the possibility of a federal death sentence while leaving stalking counts intact.
US District Judge Margaret M. Garnett said the federal murder and weapons counts were legally incompatible with the stalking charges also brought against Mangione. In the ruling, she said prosecutors could not pursue capital punishment because they had not shown that Thompson was killed while Mangione was committing another “crime of violence” under existing law. Garnett wrote that she was acting to foreclose the death penalty as a punishment available to the jury.
The decision does not end the broader case. Mangione still faces separate state charges, and the stalking counts that remain in the federal case carry a maximum sentence of life imprisonment. DW reported that the judge also dismissed a gun charge, while allowing prosecutors to use evidence seized from Mangione’s backpack at the time of his arrest.
That evidence includes a 9 mm handgun and a notebook in which investigators say he described an intention to “wack” a health insurance executive. Defense lawyers had argued the search was illegal because police had not yet obtained a warrant, but the judge ruled the material could be used.
Mangione, who is 27, has pleaded not guilty to the federal and state charges. He was arrested five days after the shooting at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania, about 230 miles west of Manhattan, and prosecutors say he came from a wealthy Maryland family and graduated from an Ivy League university.
The Thompson killing has been a politically charged case from the start because it exposed anger toward the US commercial health-care system and because some supporters portrayed Mangione as a hero. The federal government had sought the death penalty after Attorney General Pam Bondi ordered Manhattan prosecutors to pursue capital punishment, a move Mangione’s lawyers said was driven by politics rather than the merits of the case.
The ruling narrows the federal prosecution considerably, but it leaves one of the most closely watched criminal cases in the United States still active. The question now is how federal and state proceedings will move in parallel, and how prosecutors will present the remaining stalking allegations to a jury without the capital counts they originally sought.
For the immediate moment, the judge’s decision settles one major issue: the federal government cannot seek execution in this case under the counts that were filed. The remaining litigation will focus on guilt, evidence and sentence exposure, not on whether a jury can be asked to consider death.
