Ms. Bondi said her decision came after “careful consideration” and was in line with President Trump’s executive order directing the Justice Department to renew use of the death penalty requests after President Biden declared a moratorium on capital punishment for most federal offenders in 2021.

The move, which was widely anticipated, represented the intersection of Mr. Trump’s anti-crime agenda with a horrific, headline-grabbing murder case — the killing in broad daylight of a 50-year-old health care executive targeted because Mr. Mangione saw him as a symbol of callous corporate greed, according to prosecutors.

“Luigi Mangione’s murder of Brian Thompson — an innocent man and father of two young children — was a premeditated, coldblooded assassination that shocked America,” Ms. Bondi said in a statement.

Ms. Bondi directed Matthew Podolsky, the acting U.S. attorney in Manhattan, to seek the death penalty. Nicholas Biase, a spokesman for the office, which has been prosecuting Mr. Mangione’s federal case, declined to comment on Tuesday.

It is not clear if the department, under Ms. Bondi, has requested the use of the death penalty before — but the request that it be applied if Mr. Mangione is convicted is among the first.

The department is likely to announce other requests for the death penalty as they conduct a review of cases where doing so would be appropriate, according to an official with knowledge of the situation.

Federal prosecutors in Manhattan filed murder charges against Mr. Mangione, a resident of Towson, Md., on Dec. 14. The complaint accused him of “meticulously” planning the shooting. Investigators said he tracked Mr. Thompson’s movements and staked out his hotel in the days before the killing, after checking into an hostel on the Upper West Side using false identification.

The Manhattan district attorney’s office charged Mr. Mangione with first-degree murder later that month. He faces the possibility of life in prison without parole on those charges.

Mr. Mangione, 26, was arrested at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pa., five days after a hooded gunman fitting his description approached Mr. Thompson on the sidewalk as he was heading into an early morning investors’ conference at the New York Hilton Midtown.

He pleaded not guilty in both cases.

In an executive order issued on his first day in office, Mr. Trump directed the department to seek the death penalty for “crimes of a severity demanding its use,” without consideration of “other factors.”

The order included two examples that do not appear to directly correspond to the crimes Mr. Mangione is accused of committing — the murder of a law enforcement officer and a capital crime committed by an undocumented immigrant.

The federal criminal complaint against Mr. Mangione included one count of using a firearm to commit murder, which carried a maximum potential sentence of death, along with two stalking counts and a firearms offense.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5703171&forum_id=2:#48803261)