Alli Sullivan – författare

When a CEO is shot on a Manhattan sidewalk and the accused becomes an internet folk hero, what does justice actually require?In December 2024, UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was gunned down outside a Midtown hotel. Within days, Luigi Mangione—a 26-year-old valedictorian with no prior record—was in federal custody. Within weeks, the internet had made him a saint. Within months, Attorney General Pam Bondi announced via social media graphic that the federal government would seek his execution.The People v. Luigi Mangione refuses every easy answer this case invites.Jeff Hood, a spiritual advisor who has witnessed eleven executions, and Alli Sullivan, a chronically ill death penalty abolitionist who has spent years fighting executions, bring unusual moral authority to one of the most-watched criminal cases in decades. Across eight essays, they condemn the killing of Brian Thompson. They condemn the pursuit of the death penalty against Mangione. And they condemn the healthcare industry whose denial letters kill quietly, by the thousands, while the country looks away.Inside, you'll find:A searing analysis of how the federal death penalty actually operates—before indictment, before defense, before justiceA theological meditation on Mangione's engagement with Krishnamurti and Christ, and the "e;yearning to be revolutionary"e; that may have destroyed himA firsthand account of life inside the American healthcare system, and the structural violence that kills without ever pulling a triggerAn unflinching critique of the Luigi fandom—the memes, the thirst posts, the courthouse campouts—and how performative support is helping the prosecution build its caseConcrete policy proposals: mandatory disclosure of denial rates, criminal liability for fraudulent denials, bans on AI-driven claim rejectionsA warning about what happens when a democracy outsources moral reasoning to hashtagsHood and Sullivan are equal-opportunity disappointers. Readers looking to canonize Mangione will find no support here. Readers who want him executed will find a detailed argument for why state killing solves nothing. What both will find is a book that takes seriously what most commentary refuses to: that two forms of violence—the bullet and the denial letter—are part of the same American problem, and neither will be fixed by killing one more person.A clear-eyed, morally serious reckoning with the case that exposed everything broken at the center of American life.

What does it cost to stand beside the condemned?In The Embodiment of Abolition, death penalty abolitionists Jeff Hood and Alli Sullivan offer an unflinching account of life on the front lines of the fight against state killing. This is not a book of statistics or detached policy arguments. It is a raw, embodied testimony from two activists who have written the letters, made the visits, walked the final miles, and witnessed friends strapped to gurneys and killed by the state.Structured around the visceral realities of this work—Humanity, The Fight, Rage, Grief, Truth, Alone, Success—Hood and Sullivan move between memoir, theology, and moral philosophy to confront what executions do to the condemned, to their families, to the witnesses, and to the soul of a nation. They draw on the searing case of Anthony Sanchez, who wrote the foreword days before Oklahoma executed him, and Arthur Brown Jr., whose final words still echo through these pages.Here, abolition is not an abstraction. It is presence. It is rage that refuses to burn out. It is grief that refuses to be silenced. It is the radical insistence that the monster we name in others is the monster we refuse to name in ourselves.