Lunar_VoyagerAttorney General Pam Bondi directs prosecutors to seek death penalty for Luigi Mangione
It’s my understanding that this will make it far more difficult for them to get a conviction/verdict. Going for the death penalty has certain bars to hit during a trial by jury. It’s often why prosecutors go after lesser sentences on things people absolutely did the worse versions of. This gives them a much more likely guilty verdict from a jury.
By doing this, they’re basically torpedoing the case, as I understand it.
Purely to try and scare people/send a message.
When he’s rendered a verdict of not-guilty for the crimes that would lead to the death penalty, but is guilty of something relatively trivial, like “owning an unregistered firearm”, this could come back to bite them in the ass.
But who knows. I’ve been hoping for the judicial system to bite the ass of fascists for almost a decade now, without much luck.
That’s true in state crimes, but federal prosecutions are actually very different.
Federal prosecutors have a lot more room to argue and in general the court tends to favor the prosecution much more.
The judge is responsible for sentencing (and Trump appointed a lot, guarantee he gets a Trump judge), while discovery is much more restrictive against the defendant.