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........

© The Intercept