It is hard to imagine the horror of what Vance Boelter allegedly did in Minnesota on June 14. On that Saturday, he is accused of murdering Minnesota state Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband and of attempting to kill Sen. John Hoffman and his wife.
These crimes had the same bolt-out-of-the-blue, no-one-is-safe quality that Truman Capote made famous in In Cold Blood. Brooklyn Park and Champlin, where the shootings took occurred, are like Holcomb, Kansas the setting for the killings about which Capote wrote, not places where residents usually have to worry about seemingly random acts of violence.
Arriving at the Hoffmans’ home in Champlin, Boelter is supposed to have “knocked and shouted: ‘This is police’…. After Sen. Hoffman tried to push Boelter out the door, [prosecutors say he] shot him repeatedly and then shot his wife….”
The AP quotes Yvette Hoffman who said, “her husband underwent several surgeries. ‘He took 9 bullet hits. I took 8 and we are both incredibly lucky to be alive.’”
Around 2:30 a.m. Boelter then went to the Brooklyn Park home of Rep. Hortman, where he again claimed to be a policeman to get her to open the door.
Of course, the crimes with which Boelter is charged were anything but random. PBS reported that prosecutors described them “as a meticulously planned attack.” They say he “had dozens of apparent targets, including officials in at least three other states.”
All of the politicians named in Boelter’s writings were Democrats, “including more than 45 state and federal officials in Minnesota…. Elected leaders in Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin said they, too, were mentioned in his writings.”
As troubling as these allegations are and as tragic as the shootings were, Boelter should not be subjected to a capital prosecution, brought by the federal government in a state that has not had the death penalty on the books for more than a century. Minnesota’s last execution took place in 1906, when it put William Williams to death for a double murder.
Williams’ execution was horribly botched. That led to the death penalty’s abolition in the state five years later. But as the DPIC reminds us, “Minnesota has seen a number of unsuccessful attempts to reinstate the death penalty” in the intervening years. Many of them came after “high-profile homicides.”
But I do not think that the prospect that Minnesota will reinstate the death penalty after what happened last month poses the greatest likely avenue for a capital prosecution in Boelter’s case.
That the real threat emanates from the federal government and the Trump administration was made clear on Monday, June 16, when acting US Attorney Joseph Thompson charged Boelter with six federal crimes.
Two of them involved stalking of his victims, two involved murder with the use of a firearm, and two other firearms offenses. Several of those charges would make Boelter eligible for the death penalty.
While Thompson says that no decision has been made yet about whether the government will bring a capital prosecution, he calls the crimes “the stuff of nightmares.” He added that “A motive is unclear,” but also called the crimes “political assassinations.”
However, the decision whether to seek the death penalty will not be Thompson’s.
Recall that on the first day of his new term, President Trump issued an Executive Order directing the Attorney General to seek “the death penalty for all crimes of a severity demanding its use.” On February 5, AG Pam Bondi followed up on that Executive Order.
Among other things, she wrote that: “federal prosecutors at the Department, including at U.S. Attorney’s Offices, shall seek the death penalty—if that is a penalty proscribed by Congress—for the most serious, readily provable offenses, and if doing so is consistent with the relevant statutory considerations and other applicable regulations and Department of Justice guidance.”
To date, the Attorney General has authorized federal prosecutors to seek the death penalty in “at least three cases, including against Luigi Mangione for the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.”
Boelter’s case would seem to fit squarely within the president’s Executive Order and Bondi’s implementing memo. Indeed, in the immediate aftermath of the June 14 attacks, President Trump said “Our Attorney General, Pam Bondi, and the FBI are investigating the situation, and they will be prosecuting anyone involved to the fullest extent of the law. Such horrific violence will not be tolerated in the United States of America.”
But there are two wrinkles in Boelter’s case that may complicate the decision about whether the fullest extent of the law means the death penalty.
First, if it turns out (and it is not yet clear) that Boelter was a supporter of President Trump and was acting on his own to punish the president’s opponents, that may play into the Justice Department’s death penalty calculus. Add to the mix, he appears to have singled out legislators “who have been outspoken in favor of abortion rights.”
A second complication is the fact that Minnesota is an abolitionist state, although that fact alone has not stopped the federal government from bringing capital prosecutions in similar states. Writing in 2017, Professor Michael Zydney Mannheimer observed that “in the last twenty-three years, the federal government has sought the death penalty dozens of times in non-death penalty states…. And since 2002, eleven people have been sentenced to death by the federal government for criminal conduct occurring in non-death penalty states.”
Even so, Minnesotans, empaneled as members of a federal jury, may be reluctant to convict Boelter of a capital crime or to impose a death sentence. As Professor Mark Osler, who teaches law at St. Thomas Law School in Minneapolis, reminds us, federal prosecutors would face “‘a jury pool drawn from the citizens of a state that has rejected the death penalty for over 100 years. It’s not the same as choosing people in a state where there’s a history of support for the death penalty, such as Texas.’”
Or as Mary Moriarty, the County Attorney in the county where the crimes happened, puts it, “I certainly hope they respect the fact that Minnesota hasn’t had a death penalty for decades, and that’s because of our values here.”
At the end of the day, if Boelter did what prosecutors say he did, he deserves harsh punishment. That doesn’t mean the death penalty, since deserving a punishment is a necessary but not sufficient condition for imposing it.
If the feds do bring a capital prosecution, the people who sit in judgment of Boelter may be, like I am, shocked and horrified by what he did. However, their job will be to look beyond that shock and horror.
They would need to consider whether killing him will make the place where they live the kind of place they want it to be or do anything to stop America’s epidemic of political violence. Because the answer is that it will not, there is no reason to put them or the people of Minnesota through the agony of a capital trial.
