Ever since Dec. 4, no one has been able to escape the story surrounding Luigi Mangione, the man being charged with killing United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson.
Mangione’s trial is arguably the highest profile case America has seen since O. J. Simpson. Photos of him flood social media feeds, some users even creating edits of him to sultry music.
However, this isn’t an article about the controversies surrounding Mangione; instead, it’s about the death penalty and how not handing it to someone like Nikolas Cruz — the man behind the 2018 Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting — is sickening.
In my first year with The Ramapo News, I wrote a viewpoint on how Cruz was sentenced too leniently. I believe in the death penalty and I think Cruz deserved it. He took 17 lives, yet gets to live out the rest of his life. While he does not have access to the possibility of parole, I still don’t like that he gets to eat and sleep and be taken care of while the families of the victims suffer.
Mangione has been charged with two counts of stalking, a firearms offense and murder through the use of a firearm, which according to ABC News, “makes him eligible for the death penalty if convicted.”
The justice system is trying to make an example out of him by telling people that not conforming to capitalism will result in your — for lack of a better word — execution.
Do I agree with what Mangione did? No, murder is obviously wrong, but I also do not agree with hoping to give him the death penalty and not giving it to school shooters.
It’s hard to ignore the optics here: a man kills a powerful CEO — a symbol of corporate America — and the justice system immediately gears up to make an example out of him. It’s not just about justice for Thompson; it’s about preserving the image of untouchability around the corporate elite. The death penalty in this case doesn’t feel like justice — it feels like a threat.
Mangione killed someone with status. Cruz killed 17 people with no institutional power; and that difference might be the real reason why one is on death row and the other isn’t. After all, Florida does allow the death penalty.
If prosecutors really believed in the death penalty as a moral response to heinous crimes, they’d apply it consistently. But right now, it looks like what they really believe in is protecting the people who represent money, power and the system that upholds them.
Yes, charges and consequences differ between states and between levels — he traveled and stalked in order to kill Thompson which makes it federal — and most school shooters cannot receive the death penalty due to their age, but Cruz was over 18 at the time of his crime.
It’s worth asking whether the public — and therefore the justice system — responds more strongly to the killing of someone powerful than to the deaths of dozens of students and teachers. Are lives only valuable if they belong to the elite?
ajones11@ramapo.edu
Featured photo courtesy of @Proudsocialist, X
