APRIL 3, 2025 | OPINION | By Rachel Weissman (Opinion Editor)
On April 1, Attorney General Pam Bondi directed prosecutors to seek the death penalty for Luigi Mangione, the internet’s newest criminal crush.
Mangione was charged with stalking and murdering UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson after he was shot and killed in Manhattan, N.Y., last December. The video of Thompson’s death and Mangione’s subsequent mugshot sparked conversation across social media about Mangione’s contentious move and attractiveness for allegedly taking down the corporate figurehead.
Bondi is reaching high with this sentence, as it is unusual for federal prosecutors to pursue the death penalty in states where capital punishment is illegal, such as New York.
Mangione’s fans’ responses to Bondi’s recommendation reignited the never-ending online brush fire: the death penalty debate. The silver lining is that keyboard warriors are arguing about something that actually matters.
I’m not getting on my high horse to tell you the death penalty is unethical or how the argument of deterrence has been proven false, but rather advocating for a more straightforward reason: it’s too expensive. This is not a revolutionary argument, but it’s one that often gets hidden in the partisan rhetoric in today’s politics.
Simply put, the death penalty is an unnecessary financial burden on the already depleted criminal justice system and one that death row inmates often take advantage of.
From appeals, retrials and delays, inmates are often on death row far longer than the system was set up for. Michael Selsor, an Oklahoma death row inmate, was first sentenced to death in 1976 and was imprisoned for about 36 years and three months before his execution in 2012.
“With the death penalty sentence, I’m entitled to more appeals — the government’s gonna pay for it. I don’t have to do it myself if I don’t have the money for a lawyer, which I don’t have. Instead, I’m relying on public defenders to do my appeals,” Selsor said in an interview.
Selsor and other death row inmates do not pay their legal fees and housing costs. They are only fighting to survive, prolonging the already expensive process — a long game of Russian Roulette where taxpayers suffer the price. At this point, the increasing time between sentencing and execution is unsustainable.
And to kill the mood even further, this issue is getting increasingly worse. In 1982, the average time between sentencing and execution was about six years, but as of 2019, it’s 22 years. It costs about $65,000 annually to house and provide legal counsel for a death row inmate, whereas the average prisoner is held for $20,000 less.
Texas is the most damning example. With the highest death sentence rate in the country, the average death penalty case in Texas costs $2.3 million, which is three times more expensive than life in prison. The claim that executing someone is less expensive than maintaining them in prison is simply false.
And of course, obtaining the materials for executions is far from simple. The most frequently used method of execution today is lethal injection using pentobarbital, but the drug is becoming increasingly difficult to obtain. In October 2020, Arizona spent $1.5 million on lethal injection drugs, paid for at a 1,000% markup price.
Harvard Medical School professor Prashant Yadav was an outspoken critic of this transaction back in 2021, scrutinizing the alleged illegal purchase of these drugs.
“These drugs are being traded in a zone of unclear regulatory apparatus, and so they typically charge a higher price,” he said. With multiple states switching drugs, crossing state lines to obtain them and failing to record the payments, pushback was inevitable as these were all federal violations that had gone unaccounted for until The Guardian broke the story in 2021. Quite a setback for death penalty supporters.
From my random Tuesday night deep dive on Mangione and the sentence he’s facing, I’ve gathered one thing: death row inmates will use the tremendously slow and painfully expensive criminal justice system to their advantage. And if criminals aren’t scared of the death penalty, maybe we should be.