A federal judge’s ruling that the government can’t seek the death penalty against Luigi Mangione in the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson could have direct implications on any attempt to seek the same punishment against Vance Boelter for allegedly carrying out a politically motivated rampage that killed Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, and seriously injured Sen. John Hoffman his wife, Yvette.
U.S. District Judge Margaret Garnett dismissed a federal murder charge that had enabled prosecutors to seek capital punishment against Mangione, finding it technically flawed. She wrote that she did so to “foreclose the death penalty as an available punishment to be considered by the jury” as it weighs whether to convict Mangione.
To seek the death penalty, prosecutors needed to show that Mangione killed Thompson while committing another “crime of violence.” Prosecutors had tied Mangione’s murder charge to his stalking charge, but Garnett wrote in her opinion that stalking doesn’t fit the definition of a “crime of violence,” citing case law and legal precedents.
The federal charges filed last year in Minnesota against Boelter presented a similar argument that he had stalked the Hortmans and Hoffmans. The government labeled those stalking allegations as a “crime of violence” and attached it to Boelter’s use of a firearm to kill the Hortmans and injure the Hoffmans, including attempting to shoot the Hoffman’s daughter, Hope. A status conference is scheduled in Boelter’s case for Feb. 20 in Minneapolis, where prosecutors were set to update Judge Dulce Foster on whether they would seek the death penalty.
Kimberly Sharkey, one of the attorneys representing Boelter, declined to comment to the Star Tribune about any potential implications from the ruling on their case. Messages sent to the attorneys prosecuting Boelter were not immediately returned.
Garnett gave prosecutors 30 days to update her on whether they’ll appeal her death penalty decision issued in the Southern District of New York. A spokesperson for the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan, which is prosecuting the federal case against Mangione, declined to comment.
Garnett acknowledged her decision that stalking is not a crime of violence “may strike the average person — and indeed many lawyers and judges — as tortured and strange, and the result may seem contrary to our intuitions about the criminal law.” But, she said, it reflected her “committed effort to faithfully apply the dictates of the Supreme Court to the charges in this case. The law must be the Court’s only concern.”
Garrett wrote that federal law clarifies that a crime of violence “must be felonies that by definition involve force.” And that the Supreme Court has held that violent force means “force capable of causing physical pain or injury to another person.”
