It wasn’t a shock when U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi announced this month that the federal government would seek the death penalty for the most famous accused murderer in the country. One of the first executive orders Donald Trump signed upon retaking office directs her to seek it whenever possible, and Luigi Mangione — who also faces cases in New York and Pennsylvania for his alleged murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson — had been sitting in a federal jail in Brooklyn since December, awaiting an indictment. Bondi wasn’t coy about why she wanted Mangione’s to be a capital case; she declared that it was part of her mission to “carry out President Trump’s agenda to stop violent crime and Make America Safe Again.” Mangione’s lead defense lawyer, Karen Friedman Agnifilo, called this “political” and “barbaric.” In a statement, she wrote, “While claiming to protect against murder, the federal government moves to commit the pre-meditated, state-sponsored murder of Luigi.” Last week, a grand jury indicted her client on four counts, including murder with a firearm. Friday afternoon, he entered a plea of not guilty in Manhattan federal court, as the first capital case of Trump Two.

In both the number and pace of his federal executions, Trump has no rival in the 21st or 20th centuries. During the last six months of his first term — while Americans’ attention was yanked away by school reopenings, COVID deaths, vaccine news, protests and police violence, and the desperate run-up to the presidential election — his administration embarked on a killing spree that resulted in the deaths of 13 people on death row. It started on July 14, 2020, when the federal government executed Daniel Lewis Lee, a man who was convicted of murder, racketeering, and conspiracy and who was on death row for over two decades. In total, the Trump administration killed 12 men and one woman, all with lethal injections of pentobarbital.

Executions are declining around the country, but they are especially rare in the federal system. Before Lee, the federal government had not executed anyone in 17 years. Trump’s administration executed more people than the past ten presidents combined. The last time so many people were executed by the federal government during a single presidential term was during Grover Cleveland’s second term in the 1890s. The Trump administration was in such a hurry to execute that one man, Wesley Purkey, still had an appeal pending in court when he was killed. The last to die, Dustin Higgs, was killed just........

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