Justice Department seeks death penalty for man who killed fellow supermax inmate (2025)

By: Alanna Durkin Richer, The Associated PressPosted: 2:26 PM CDT Thursday, Apr. 10, 2025

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WASHINGTON (AP) — The Justice Department will seek the death penalty for a man accused of killing a fellow prisoner at the federal government’s “Supermax” prison in Florence, Colorado, while serving a life sentence for killing his cellmate at another lockup, the department announced Thursday.

Ishmael Petty, who was separately convicted of assaulting prison employees, is the latest to face a possible death sentence as the Trump administration pushes to revive federal capital punishment. The Justice Department last week announced that it would seek the death penalty for Luigi Mangione in the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.

U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi on her first day in office lifted a Biden-era moratorium on federal executions, and has said she will seek the death penalty “whenever possible.”

Petty, 56, was serving a life sentence at ADX Florence, the highest-security federal prison in the U.S., when prosecutors say he killed a fellow inmate in the same unit in 2020. He was sentenced to life in prison in 2002 for killing another fellow inmate after being locked up for a 1998 bank robbery conviction. He was also convicted in 2015 of attacking two prison librarians and a case manager who were delivering books to his cell, prosecutors said.

There was no attorney listed yet for Petty in the latest case. An attorney who previously represented him didn’t immediately respond to an email seeking comment.

Trump’s administration carried out 13 federal executions during his first term, more than under any president in modern history. He signed an order on his first day back in the White House compelling the Justice Department to not only seek the death penalty in appropriate federal cases, but also to help preserve capital punishment in states that have struggled to maintain adequate supplies of lethal injection drugs.

Federal executions were halted under the Biden administration after Attorney General Merrick Garland ordered a review of capital punishment protocols. In his final weeks in office, Democratic President Joe Biden recently converted to life in prison the sentences for 37 of the 40 federal death row inmates.

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