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WASHINGTON -- Luigi Mangione, the Ivy League graduate charged with fatally shooting UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on a Manhattan sidewalk in December, has pleaded not guilty in connection with the killing. Like all defendants, Mangione enters the courtroom with the presumption of innocence. But if a jury finds him guilty of the capital murder of which he is accused, Mangione could be sentenced to the death penalty.

Ah, but there is trouble in paradise for death penalty opponents whose activism jams or slows down the wheels of justice. President Donald Trump is stone-cold serious about restoring the death penalty -- or what's left of it after four years with Joe Biden in the Oval Office.

As Trump said during a speech at the Department of Justice on Friday, he wants to add the murder of a police officer to the roster of capital offenses and fast-track trials of accused cop killers.

The contrast with former President Joe Biden could not be more pronounced. A supporter of the death penalty early in his career, Scranton Joe's position on the issue migrated so that by 2020, he was campaigning on a pledge to end capital punishment in the federal justice system.

Not that Biden meant anything he said. In 2024, in the ultimate weasel move, Biden commuted the sentences of 37 of federal death row's 40 inmates. Clinton pollster Mark Penn called the move "yet another desperate act" to get media and left-wing approval by showing mercy on "some of the most heinous" double and triple murderers.

Ever the baby-splitter, Biden left three cases for Trump -- on the grounds that Biden supported executions for "terrorism and hate-motivated mass murder."

(Hello, all murder is hate-motivated.)

The three remaining death row inmates now under Trump's jurisdiction are Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 31, who killed three and injured more than a dozen innocents in the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing; Dylann Roof, 30, who killed nine Black parishioners in a South Carolina church in 2015; and 50-something Robert D. Bowers, who in 2018 shot and killed 11 worshippers at Pittsburgh's Tree of Life Synagogue.

Prompting wags like me to wonder: If Biden believed in the death penalty for terrorists and mass murderers, what was he doing for the past four years?

I have little doubt that Team Trump will work to escort these three sentences to the needle's end.

On the first day of his second term, Trump signed a document that declared, "my administration will not tolerate efforts to stymie and eviscerate the laws that authorize capital punishment against those who commit horrible acts of violence against American citizens."

Back to Mangione, who after being charged by Biden's Department of Justice, set up a legal defense fund that has drawn more than $720,000 in big and small contributions. That's a nice haul for a man accused of, as CNN chief legal analyst John Miller put it, "shooting a man in the back."

The defendant has a website that answers such questions as, "Can I send Luigi photos?" (The answer is yes, but Luigi asks supporters not to send more than five photos at a time.)

The defendant also has a small army of attorneys headed by TV lawyer Karen Friedman Agnifilo, who has framed her client as a political prisoner facing "politicized" charges.

Thompson, the victim, was a man whose only crime was working in health care, an industry that employs 22 million, including nearly 10 million doctors and other practitioners, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Can you send Brian a photo of yourself? No.

Contact Review-Journal Washington columnist Debra J. Saunders at dsaunders@reviewjournal.com. Follow @debrajsaunders on X.

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