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With the manhunt ongoing for Charlie Kirk’s killer, Utah’s Republican Gov. Spencer Cox warned Wednesday that “we still have the death penalty” in the state. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis likewise called for a “quick death penalty prosecution.”
Capital prosecutions are generally the opposite of quick, and no one has been charged yet in Kirk’s death (indeed, law enforcement officials had not publicly identified a suspect as of Thursday morning). But here’s what to know about capital punishment in Utah and federally, as state and federal prosecutors can simultaneously charge defendants without violating double jeopardy protections.
Utah is one of 27 states with the death penalty, in addition to the federal government and the military, according the Death Penalty Information Center. As is the case with U.S. gun violence — which featured in yet another school shooting, in Colorado, on the same day Kirk was shot at a Utah university — the U.S. is also a global outlier on capital punishment. Unlike gun violence, capital punishment has declined nationwide over the years. The Trump administration has prioritized reviving it, following the Biden administration’s execution moratorium and the commutation of many federal death row sentences to life in prison.
KUTV in Salt Lake City reported last week that “Utah’s death row is dwindling,” with the four men there “having spent decades waiting for executions that may never come.” The state has both lethal injection and the firing squad, and it has executed eight people since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment nationwide in 1976 after halting it in 1972. More recently, Utah lawmakers considered but ultimately declined to do away with the punishment. To prove a capital crime, the state’s aggravated murder law requires factors such as when a defendant knowingly “created a great risk of death” to another person besides the victim or the defendant.
On the federal side, consider the case of Luigi Mangione in New York, where he’s being prosecuted by both the state and federal government for the alleged murder of health care executive Brian Thompson (Mangione pleaded not guilty). New York state doesn’t have the death penalty, but the Trump administration filed a notice of its intent to seek it in Mangione’s federal case. Among the factors listed in the government’s notice is that Mangione allegedly “created a grave risk of death to one or more persons in addition to the victim” and “committed the offense after substantial planning and premeditation.”
It’s premature to fully analyze the legal situation in Kirk’s killing without even an alleged suspect in custody, much less charged. But based on what we know so far — that a person apparently shot Kirk from a distant roof through a crowd — the above factors could come into play if and when a criminal case, or cases, are brought.
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