Wednesday, April 2, 2025

Part I

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AG Pam Bondi Moves for Death Penalty in Trial of Luigi Mangione: Look at the Statement by Mangione’s Attorney

The attorney general of the United States, Pamela Bondi, announced yesterday that the Justice Department will seek the death penalty in the prosecution of Luigi Mangione, the man who is now charged officially with premeditated cold-blooded assassination, in the attorney general’s terms, in the killing after stalking of healthcare executive Brian Thompson. That took place on December the 4th, 2024. So just a matter of less than a year ago. And as the Justice Department statement released, “The murder was an act of political violence. Mangione’s actions involved substantial planning and premeditation. And because the murder took place in public with bystanders nearby, may pose a great risk to additional persons.”

Okay, so I think all of us remember this crime when it took place. And in a way that is not so unexpected now, as in previous times it would’ve been impossible, you have all this on film. And so you actually see the murder taking place. And it was, simply defined, cold-blooded murder. It was premeditated, it was intentional. This was a man who was individually identified and staked out by the murderer who had a plan not only for the murder of his victim, but also for his escape.

And so you really are looking at a premeditated plan. You’re looking at the definition of first degree murder, or at least what in most jurisdictions is called first degree murder, intentional homicide. The attorney general has said that the federal government is going to be seeking the death penalty in this case.

Now, there’s some really interesting things that come out of this. For example, you have the Wall Street Journal’s news coverage telling us this, “A lawyer from Mangione accused the Justice Department of being motivated by politics. ‘While claiming to protect against murder, the federal government moves to commit the premeditated state-sponsored murder of Luigi’.” The attorney went on to say, “By doing this, they’re defending the broken, immoral and murderous healthcare industry that continues to terrorize the American people.”

All right. In all honesty, I did not expect that level of venality from an attorney making this kind of case. So you have the attorney, the defense attorney in this case, Karen Friedman Agnifilo, who is making the case that it’s the wrongful attempt to use the death penalty against her client. Now that’s what she’s being paid to say. She’s being paid to make that argument, but she really made the argument very badly. And in this case, the fact that she made a bad argument badly tells us a lot about the moral issue which is at stake, which is the death penalty and the seriousness of murder. So let’s just step back for a moment.

So where in the world did we get the idea that the crime of premeditated murder should be met with the death penalty? Well, it comes directly from the Word of God, Genesis 9, in the passage known as the Noahic covenant. It is the covenant God made with Noah and through Noah to all humanity. The text tells us beginning in verse 1 of Genesis 9, “And God blessed Noah and his sons and said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. The fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth and upon every bird of the heavens, upon everything that creeps on the ground and all the fish of the sea, into your hand, they are delivered. Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you. And as I gave you the green plants, I give you everything. But you shall not eat flesh with its life, that is its blood. And for your life blood, I will require a reckoning. From every beast I will require and from man. From his fellow man, I will require a reckoning for the life of man’.”

Then in verse 6, this is the classic text from the Noahic covenant Genesis 9, “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed. For God made man in his own image.” Now that sounds like it could apply to any crime related to murder, manslaughter, even accidental manslaughter, something like that. But the entirety of the Old Testament law makes very clear that that law made a distinction between different levels of premeditation and moral involvement in murder.

There are acts that lead to death accidentally. There are situations that are less than what would now be described as premeditated murder or first degree murder. But it is really clear that in the context of the Noahic covenant, Genesis 9:6, the principle of capital punishment is intentionally revealed by God so as to underline the sanctity of human life, the dignity of human life, the worth of human life. And it’s not just human life valuable on its own. It is because we are made in God’s image. That’s exactly what the text says. Three lines. Number one, “Whoever sheds the blood of man.” Second line, “By man shall his blood be shed.”

So there it is. It’s just an axiomatic principle. It relates to what we call premeditated murder or premeditated homicide, often referred to as first degree murder. It’s intentional murder. It requires that premeditation and intentionality. It requires the self-consciousness of the moral act undertaken. It’s intentional murder. And the text tells us in a way that’s abundantly clear, when intentional murder takes place, the murderer forfeits his own life. Why? That’s the third line in Genesis 9:6, “For God made man in his own image.” Now that means two things. That means that human life is invaluable not because of our status, but because of the fact that we are image bearers of God.

The second thing this tells us is that an attack upon God’s image in an act of murder is an assault upon God himself, that he takes very seriously. That God says that it is to be a capital crime for, because God made man in his own image.

Now, in a fallen world, this becomes particularly important. We do recognize there are crimes and there are crimes. Even when it comes to crimes that involve a death, there are crimes, and then there are crimes. There’s a difference between involuntary manslaughter and premeditated murder. There are degrees in between that assign responsibility and what is ethically called agency in terms of that responsibility. The more agency that is exercised, the more intentionality and willfulness that is exercised, the more criminal the act. This is reflected in our laws, reflected also in Scripture.

But in the case of premeditated murder, that the intentional murder of a human being, the Scripture is really clear that the answer to that is the death penalty. And the logic of it is made clear. It is because this is an assault upon the image of God. That’s not a law that reflects just a human intention. It’d be a good idea if we really have a serious sanction against this murder thing. No, this is the creator’s designation, command, authority, and argument. It is not presented just as a naked fact. It’s presented in the context of the definition of a covenant, the handing down of a covenant with Noah and thus with humanity.

By the way, a very important note about Genesis 9 in the Noahic covenant is that a good deal of it is a repetition of the covenant that God made with Adam. And so even as you’re looking at this, you recognize, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth,” that wasn’t said originally just to Noah and his sons. It was said to Adam and to all humanity. But it also includes the fact that you have this designation of capital punishment when it comes to murder precisely because of the fact that God made man in his own image.

Now, one of the things to note there is that this comes after Cain killed Abel, and so we’re on the other side of that event. Murder’s a real thing. By the time this covenant is established and God gives this to Noah, no one knows exactly what homicide is.

But let’s go back to the statement made by this lawyer because it’s just really revealing. “While claiming to protect against murder, the federal government moves to commit the premeditated state-sponsored murder of Luigi.” Okay, this is a defense attorney. She is arguably earning her fee, she’s fulfilling her responsibility. She’s making the best case she can come up with. But her case is that if indeed the federal death penalty is administered, the federal government would be, in her own words here, committing “the premeditated state sponsored murder of Luigi.”

Now, you buy into that, let me just say you’re not only buying into a ban on capital punishment, you are buying into a ban on imprisonment. The logic of her statement simply won’t hold for a second. You could turn this logic around and say at the federal level, someone could be charged with something just very, very minor in the great scheme of things. And the attorney can get up and say that if there’s imprisonment on the line, the federal government moves to commit the premeditated state-sponsored imprisonment of that person, detainment of that person. It is just a stupid argument.

But again, this is a very bad case for this attorney. The attorney, let’s give her a little bit of understanding here. She’s in a tough spot. She has the constitutional responsibility to represent her client and to do so, in this case, over against a federal death penalty prosecution. And so she arguably, in our constitutional order, has the responsibility to make the best argument she can, but it tells you a whole lot that evidently this is the best argument she thinks she can make.

But I’m giving her no pass whatsoever, no room whatsoever for the way she ended the statement. “By doing this, they,” that is the prosecution, the US Department of Justice, they are, “defending the broken, immoral and murderous healthcare industry that continues to terrorize the American people.” Okay. Just watch that. Something happened there. And I think in this case, she has really committed a major moral and legal fault. And I want you to look at what she said. She said, “By making this a death penalty prosecution, the Justice Department is defending,” what does she say, “the broken, immoral and murderous healthcare industry that continues to terrorize the American people.” She appears to say there was justification for the murder of this healthcare executive, in this case, Brian Thompson of United Healthcare.

She’s also saying the federal government is complicit, basically in, immoral, broken, murderous healthcare industry that continues to terrorize the American people. Now, you can make all kinds of cases positive and negative from the left or the right, criticizing the healthcare system. That’s not even Germaine here. The point that is so morally significant here is that the attorney says the federal government is seeking the death penalty is actually upholding the broken, immoral and murderous healthcare industry. Okay. I think she’s way over the line there.

Now again, she is bearing their assignment to make the best argument she can so I’ll let a lawyer say whether her argument is in legal terms in bounds or not. But I’ll tell you what, in moral terms, this is an absolute atrocity. And you know what? I don’t think this is going to help her client one bit. I think it’s also interesting that the US attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York, that by the way, in the evaluation of many’s most powerful US attorney’s office in the United States, it is rather famous in American history for going after organized crime.

The spokesperson for the US Attorney’s Office responded to the statement made by Luigi Mangione’s attorney with “no comment.” As we’re told, the Justice Department “declined to comment.” I think this is exactly what I would do too. Just let those words sit and have their effect. I don’t think any response from the government in this case is necessary.

Well, okay, I do think it’s just really important to go back to a previous development on this issue, and that was the fact that former President Joe Biden, in the final time of his tenure in the White House, commuted the sentences of no less than 37 death row inmates. And in almost all those cases, he reduced the sentence to life imprisonment without parole.

Now, I think that was the wrong thing to do. I think it was the wrongful application of the president’s pardon power and Biden would be hardly the first president to wrongfully apply that power. But I think in this case, what was most telling is that former President Biden came out and made statements against the death penalty as if he’s against the death penalty. The death penalty should not apply in this case. He made a moral objection. But then here’s the thing. Even as the Wall Street Journal reported about the Biden administration’s action, “It left in place the death sentences for three people found guilty of terrorism or hate motivated mass killings. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who with his now dead brother, bombed the 2013 Boston Marathon, killing three and wounding more than 250 others. Robert Bowers, who killed 11 people in the 2018 attack on the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh. And Dylan Roof, who in 2015 killed nine at the Emanuel African-American Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. “

Okay, so what’s my point here? My point is that if you are categorically against the death penalty and you have any consistency or honesty, you’re categorically against the death penalty. It makes no sense whatsoever to pose as if you’re morally opposed to the death penalty and then recognize that politically you can’t get past, you can’t get away with pardoning some for extremely egregious multiple murders. If murder’s wrong, murder’s wrong. If the death penalty is the right response to murder, it is the right response to premeditated murder. That was moral evasion, and I think many people recognize it at the time. I think the bottom line, it’s absolutely right for the attorney general of the United States and the US Department of Justice to announce that is seeking the death penalty in this case, premeditated murder, very premeditated, very much murder carried out even with the documentation of seeing it happen live on video, which raises another issue. And I’m not going to ask former President Biden to answer this question, I don’t think he’s up to it. And that question is, if the death penalty doesn’t apply here, where would it?

Part II

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The Speaker Tries to Nix Proposal for Proxy Voting in the House: Having a Baby is Arguably a Reasonable Consideration, But the Failed Proposal Reveals A Lot

But now I’m going to shift to a different issue, and I want to tell you right up front it is a less important issue. It’s less clear in terms of the Christian worldview, but it’s still a very relevant issue in terms of America’s public life. And as always is the case, there’s some deeper issues as we’re trying to think faithfully as Chrisians through the lens of a Christian worldview. It’s not only about what, it’s also about what priority. But it’s also a reminder that all this is part of a comprehensive whole. So sometimes it’s our job to look at something and say, “well, what’s really at stake here?”

And so here’s the headline, Associated Press yesterday, “Speaker Mike Johnson Fails to Squash Anna Paulina Luna’s Proxy Voting Effort.” Okay, that’s interesting. What we’re told here is that the speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, Republican Speaker of the House, very thin majority there in the House of Representatives, he had failed in a procedural move to squash an effort to try to create an opening for proxy voting for members of Congress who have just given birth.

And so the Associated Press reports it this way, “House speaker Mike Johnson exercised his power of the gavel Tuesday in an unusually aggressive effort to squash a proposal for new parents in Congress to be able to vote by proxy rather than in person as they care for newborns. His plan failed 206-22.”

All right. All right. Well, we’re also told, “In an unprecedented move, the House Republican leadership had engineered a way to quietly kill the bipartisan plan from two new mothers, Republican representative Anna Paulina Luna of Florida, and Democratic representative Brittany Pederson of Colorado. Their plan has support from a majority of House colleagues. Some 218 lawmakers back their effort signing on to a so-called discharge petition to force their proposal on the House floor for consideration.

Now it turns out that Speaker Johnson is really against proxy voting, against voting without being in the chamber and for any reason. And in this case, even when a member of Congress has either just given birth or is married to a woman who has just given birth.

The interesting thing that’s really happened here, the drama in this is that the speaker of the House tried a procedural move to shut the issue down and he lost. And so that gets some headlines. When you have a speaker of the House try to shut something like this down and that effort fails, well, that tells you something important is going on here. Something very interesting is going on here.

So where does this come from? Well, it is a bipartisan proposal, at least formally. And it has to do with the fact that if you go back, say, 50 or 60 years in Congress, no one’s asking the question, “What about members of the House who have just given birth?” That wasn’t conceivable until the entry of women into the Chamber. And in particular younger women, younger women of childbearing age, this becomes a complication. And there is the situation now in which in both parties you have women who are elected representatives who are also recent mothers. And I can just say as a picture, that’s a pretty sweet picture. I think the picture of new babies being brought into the world is God’s gifts, that’s always a sweet picture. The context isn’t always uncomplicated, the context isn’t always non-controversial, but the baby himself or herself is just rightfully an object of our appreciation and celebration.

Furthermore, I mean, let’s just be honest. I think all of us recognize that if you’re going to have women in the House and they’re going to give birth, they’re going to miss some votes. And that’s just the way it’s going to work. And I think Christians should be the front lines of at least saying, we take motherhood very seriously. We take the family very seriously. We take the biblical definition of the family, the biblical definition of marriage very seriously. We believe motherhood needs to be affirmed very seriously. And frankly, it becomes rather complicated to imagine how someone with a newborn can at least conveniently serve as a member the House of Representatives. But having been duly elected to the House of Representatives, it would appear that some kind of accommodation has to be made.

But what about voting? In other words, why would the speaker of the House be against this and why would he force the issue? Well, there’s a history to this. And I think the understanding of this can help clarify things.

And I can say if you’re looking at a recent issue that kind of brought the problem to a head and to public view, that would be COVID-19. I know you’re tired of remembering it, but guess what? It comes back again. That context is important because it was during COVID that the House of Representatives came up with a method for members to vote without being physically present in the chamber. Now remember, the magic number 435, the members of the House of Representatives. And the official rules say they have to be in the chamber to vote.

Now in the business world and in many other settings, the legal requirement is for reasonable consideration to be given in situations in which, for example, a mother’s just given birth. Reasonable considerations, remote work or something like that, or a maternal leave, something like that. The House of Representatives are saying no maternal leave, in that sense, in terms of voting. And no alternative. Some people are saying, “Well, that’s just really hard. That would seem to be a reasonable accommodation. What’s wrong with that?” Well, the reason the speaker was exercised about this is because in the context of COVID, the reality is that there was a temptation for a lot of people to say, “Let’s just move a lot of this action online.”

And the reality is that I’ll just say, I think just giving birth to a baby is really a justifiable cause to come to the House’s attention in this. So I want to say that. I think giving birth to a baby is something that deserves reasonable accommodation, I think from the Christian worldview, just maybe even especially so. But I understand what the speaker’s saying here when he says, “You create a context in which it’s possible because of this condition to have something like proxy voting.” Well, this House is going to decide, there are all kinds of things right down to a sprained ankle or a nephew’s wedding that would excuse you from having to be in the chamber. And I think a lot of people are going to say that’s a leap of imagination except for COVID and some other things, which led us to understand it’s not really.

And this gets to another structural problem that people don’t think about in the United States government and in the United States Congress. And given the rules of the House, it’s perhaps particularly acute in the House of Representatives. And that is that you’ve got House districts that are pretty close there to the US Capitol. No big deal to have to come in for a vote. You’ve also got House districts that are a long way from the United States Capitol. As a matter of fact, as you move westward, you are moving further and further away from immediate access to the Capitol. And so at least for some members of Congress, getting in for a vote can be something like a multi-hour process that isn’t easily undertaken.

And yet, here’s the deal. I think the speaker of the House, I’ll just say, is right in general on this question. I think his concern is rightful. And that is you give this House the opportunity to work remotely, they’re all going to take it. We won’t be missing 2, 3, 4, 5. We’ll be missing 435. And the House speaker I think is saying, “It’s not like we haven’t been here before. You give on this condition, the next thing you know, someone comes up with another condition. And so the only way to save this off is to say, “no, you have to be in the House, on the floor of the House in order to make the vote. Otherwise you just missed the vote.”

Once again, I’ll say I think there’s a reasonable case to be made here for the exception for a woman member of the Congress who has just given birth. I think that would be reasonable, but I’m saying that as an outsider. But then I look at the responsibility of the speaker of the House and he says, “Well, here’s the fact. Before long, everybody’s got a special consideration. That’s the way this works. You grant an exception. It never ends with one.”

And so I raise this issue because I think it’s always important at times to see how things are represented or misrepresented in public conversation. A lot of the press reports report this as if the speaker of the House is standing on some kind of ridiculous arbitrary principle and isn’t for mothers and for babies. I think every single one of those things is absolutely wrong. I think a case can be made either way on this. But it does make very clear that often there’s something more important, more biblically weighty under the headline. Of course, the weightiest thing here is the gift of children. But it’s also weighty to consider whether or not the character of the House of Representatives continues by requiring members to be in the chamber to vote.

Part III

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Kentucky Bans Cell Phone Use in Schools: House Bill 208 is an Important Move for Kentucky Schools – But Parents Have a Major Responsibility Here As Well

Okay, just as we end today, I want to use a local headline here from the Louisville Courier Journal. The headline is this, “Schools Must Ban Cell Phones Under New Kentucky Law.” The article is on to say, “What does that mean for the local school system here in Jefferson County, Kentucky?”

Krista Johnson is the reporter for the Courier Journal, “Students will not be allowed to freely use their cell phones within Jefferson County Public Schools next year after Kentucky legislators successfully passed a bill requiring districts statewide to implement bans.” The legislation here is House Bill 208, sponsored originally by representative Josh Bray, Republican of Mount Vernon, Kentucky. As the paper tells us, it “requires districts to adopt policies prohibiting student use of cell phones during instructional time with exceptions including for emergencies where if a teacher allows it. The bill passed through both legislative chambers unanimously and was signed into law by Governor Andy Beshear on March 26th.”

Okay, now wait just a minute. You’re telling me that something passed through both chambers of the Kentucky legislature unanimously? Well, somebody must know something’s going on here. It was signed into law by the governor. The other thing I saw here is that the law, House Bill 208, now the law, requires districts to adopt policies prohibiting student use of cell phones during instructional time with exceptions, Oh wait, just a minute. We’re in the world of those exceptions. Here they are, the exceptions are “including for emergency or if a teacher allows it.” Oof, “or a teacher allows it.” That seems to be a big loophole here.

But I think the bigger issue is the fact that you do have disruptions to educational time when it comes to cell phones in school. And it just makes sense to me. And frankly, when a legislature makes sense, we need to acknowledge it and applaud it. When the legislature says, “We need to keep the classrooms free of cell phones,” that just seems to be a really smart plan.

In a fallen world, it’s a plan, it’s a policy you can’t have just as a blanket without exceptions. There are exceptions. And I know the legislature has tried to limit those exceptions here to emergencies, or “if a teacher allows it” presumably for instructiona. There’s just about no question, by the way, that cell phone use, smartphone use has a negative effect upon student learning, particularly in a classroom. It just makes sense. Frankly, the same thing’s true at the kitchen table. If you, shame on you, allow members of the family to scroll their smartphones while sitting at the dinner table, obviously, that’s a problem. The intrusion of cell phones or smartphones and just about every dimension of life is a problem. And it’s particularly a problem where things are most serious, which like in a classroom should be restricted to instruction.

It is interesting that in the political background of this, a lot of parents have complained about this because they want their kids connected all the time. And it is good parenting to want to make sure you know where your kids are all the time. But in the classroom, that doesn’t mean you should be able to check on them and send them a, oh, I don’t know, a smiley face emoji in the middle of algebra.

Okay. I have to tell you, what made this most interesting to me was a comment made by one legislator, a woman named Linda Duncan who expressed concern about what was described as a blanket policy without parental involvement. “Like mask mandates and uniforms, these policies are only as good as their level of enforcement.” Well, that’s true. But then she asked this question or actually a series of questions, “Are parents willing to stop their kids from carrying cell phones to school? Are parents willing to accept suspensions for their kid’s non-compliance? Are parents willing to make their kids follow the rules?” All I can say is sometimes those are the kinds of questions that reveal what is really at stake. The problem in some of these situations actually doesn’t stop with the students at all. It’s extended to the parents. The parents are a part of the problem.

And you got to love those last two questions. They should weigh heavily on us. “Are parents willing to accept suspensions for their kids’ non-compliance?” Oh, by the way, I think that is a somewhat hastily written sentence. The parents aren’t suspended, the kids are. But nonetheless, you get the point. “Are parents willing to accept this?” And the second question, “Are parents willing to make their kids follow the rules?” Well, from what I observe, parents are divided between those for whom the answer is yes, and the answer is no. And some, I guess the answer is some of the time.

Another reminder of the fact that sometimes situations like this, rules like this turn out to have a larger context, it turns out to be even more interesting. The moral circle in this case is not just students and teachers, it’s also parents.

One final thought. This also just underlies the fact that policy or a law is only as good as the determination to enforce it. And so we’ll find out exactly what difference this makes in the schools when the law goes into effect, and we’ll see what happens.

Meanwhile, I’m going to ponder what it takes to get a bill unanimously through both chambers of the legislature signed by the governor. It’s going to be interesting to see whether, with all of that, it has any effect. In a fallen world, that’s sometimes hard to predict.