In early 2026, social media users recirculated a claim that prosecutors had plans to seek the death penalty for United Healthcare CEO shooting suspect Luigi Mangione but that Patrick Crusius, who killed 23 people and injured 22 more in a shooting targeting Hispanic immigrants at an El Paso, Texas, Walmart in 2019, had been offered a plea deal that would avoid capital punishment.
On social media, an image showing two news headlines side by side spread widely. One headline, purportedly from MSNBC News, was, "DOJ directs prosecutors to seek death penalty for Luigi Mangione." The second was allegedly from CNN, and it read, "Gunman who killed 23 in racist attack at Texas Walmart offered plea deal to avoid death penalty."
Screenshots of the pair of headlines spread on platforms such as Instagram, Facebook and X.
The headlines in the image were authentic headlines published by MSNBC and CNN in 2025. Furthermore, when those headlines were published, federal prosecutors were seeking the death penalty for Mangione, whereas prosecutors did not and will not seek the death penalty for Crusius.
In January 2026, a federal judge ruled that prosecutors could not seek the death penalty for Mangione due to technical flaws in their reasoning. Prosecutors did not appeal the decision, meaning that Mangione will not receive the death penalty if convicted.
Still, we have rated this claim as true because then-U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi initially directed prosecutors to seek the death penalty for Mangione in 2025, even if they were ultimately unsuccessful.
Some popular posts from 2026 claimed that the Department of Justice "is seeking" the death penalty for Mangione, which is inaccurate and outdated information.
Bondi said in a statement on April 1, 2025, that she had directed federal prosecutors to seek the death penalty for Mangione because "the murder was an act of political violence" and "may have posed grave risk of death to additional persons" because the shooting took place in public.
The federal prosecutors who charged and convicted Crusius, a white supremacist, under hate crime laws in 2023 did not provide any rationale for why they chose not to seek the death penalty. In 2025, El Paso County District Attorney James Montoya said he chose not to seek the death penalty for Crusius per the wishes of most of his victims' families — a detail that one family member publicly contradicted in an opinion piece for the news outlet El Paso Matters.
Mangione and the death penalty
As the screenshot that circulated on social media showed, the MSNBC headline, published April 1, 2025, is "DOJ directs prosecutors to seek death penalty for Luigi Mangione." This information in the headline was true; Bondi released a statement that same day via the Justice Department's Office of Public Affairs. The relevant portion of the statement is below (emphasis ours):
Luigi Mangione's murder of Brian Thompson — an innocent man and father of two young children — was a premeditated, cold-blooded assassination that shocked America. After careful consideration, I have directed federal prosecutors to seek the death penalty in this case as we carry out President Trump's agenda to stop violent crime and Make America Safe Again.
In a Jan. 30, 2026, ruling, U.S. District Judge Margaret M. Garnett determined the federal government did not provide sufficient reasoning to charge Mangione with a crime that would enable capital punishment.
In order to charge Mangione under that specific murder statute, prosecutors would have had to show that Mangione killed Thompson while committing another "crime of violence" (Page 2).
Prosecutors argued that additional charges against Mangione of stalking met the "crime of violence" requirement, but Garnett disagreed. She wrote that her decision "may strike the average person — and indeed many lawyers and judges — as tortured and strange," but that legal precedent required her to make such a decision.
"The law must be the Court's only concern," Garnett wrote (Page 3). The main purpose of dismissing the charges "is solely to foreclose the death penalty as an available punishment," Garnett wrote. In a February response, prosecutors said they "will not seek interlocutory review," meaning that they would not appeal the ruling.
Crusius and the plea deal
CNN's story, dated March 25, 2025, was a syndicated piece originally from The Associated Press, and versions of it appeared in different publications under different headlines. Still, the headline that appeared on CNN's page did, in fact, read, "Gunman who killed 23 in racist attack at Texas Walmart offered plea deal to avoid death penalty."
The information in the CNN headline was also true. El Paso County District Attorney James Montoya, a prosecutor in the Texas case, announced his office's decision not to seek the death penalty on that day at a news conference:
The first thing I wanted to do was to confirm that our office has, in fact, extended an offer to the defendant in this case to plead guilty to capital murder and a sentence to life without parole and a complete waiver of all of his appellate rights in exchange for us no longer pursuing — dropping — the death penalty in this case.
Montoya told reporters that while he personally believes Crusius should receive the death penalty, seeking that sentence would lengthen the process and go against the wishes of most of the victims' families and survivors. "I could not in good conscience continue to seek the death penalty against the wishes of so many other people," he said (see 6:40). He also acknowledged that some families still wanted him to seek the death penalty. (One family member who believed the sentence should be left to a jury wrote an op-ed calling Montoya's outreach to families "limited at best.")
Federal prosecutors also chose not to seek the death penalty for Crusius; they announced this decision on Jan. 17, 2023, in a one-sentence filing that provided no explanation. The state case, for various reasons Montoya alluded to in the news conference, has moved more slowly than the federal case, which wrapped up in July 2023.
The Justice Department later released a statement announcing that the judge in the federal case sentenced Crusius to 90 consecutive life sentences for the shooting under hate crime and firearm laws.
The administration of former U.S. President Joe Biden, who was in office during the federal trial, did not appear to provide any explanation for the decision not to pursue the death penalty in the Crusius case to reporters at the time. Biden has, in the past, opposed the death penalty.
For further reading, Snopes previously fact-checked a related claim comparing Mangione's potential death sentence to the sentences handed down to convicted school shooters.