MINNEAPOLIS — At Vance Boelter’s sentencing on Thursday, Mark Hortman’s father told the court the ultimate justice would have been Boelter’s execution, calling the Justice Department’s acceptance of two life sentences for the murder of his son and daughter-in-law, “a sad day.”

J. Carroll Hortman, 86, described himself a few ways in front of Judge John Tunheim: He was the father to Mark Hortman, the father-in-law to Melissa Hortman, and a friend to their dog, Gilbert. He is a Naples, Fla., resident and a Republican.

His victim impact statement described the family “living in peace, happiness and joy” and how viciously that life was ruptured when Boelter knocked on Mark and Melissa’s door at 3:30 a.m. on June 14, 2025.

“He murdered every living being in that house,” J. Carroll Hortman said. “He murdered my son at the door. Then he killed Gilbert. Then he terrorized my daughter-in-law, Melissa, while she ran for her life. He gunned her down. Fifteen bullets.”

Hortman lambasted the Justice Department, particularly acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, for its handling of Boelter’s prosecution and its decision to not seek the death penalty against him.

He called Blanche a “low IQ acting AG” who “did Republicans a great disservice by passing up giving us the trial we deserved.”

“When the death penalty question was in the hands of Todd Blanche, on multiple occasions I asked to speak with him. He blew me off,” Hortman alleged. “That told me all I needed to know about arrogance.”

Boelter “only killed Democrats,” Hortman said, “so Todd didn’t care.”

Last month, the Justice Department dropped its pursuit of the death penalty against Boelter.

U.S. Attorney for Minnesota Daniel Rosen said after Boelter’s guilty plea that he and Blanche saw the decision to pull the death penalty off the table in exchange for Boelter’s guilty plea “the exact same way.”

“When you have a defendant that is prepared to plead guilty, take consecutive life terms plus to ensure that he never sees freedom again in his entire life, that was an opportunity that we ... could just not pass up,” Rosen said.

In response to J. Carroll Hortman’s allegations, the Department of Justice said in a statement that seeking the death penalty was the most important decision Blanche could make and the “views of victims’ families are always an important part of that assessment.”

It added that “significant legal or evidentiary obstacles” can also leave the department with no way to pursue the death penalty.

The Justice Department’s pursuit of death penalty cases has been a core tenet of the Trump administration.

On Jan. 20, 2025, Trump signed an executive order called “Restoring the Death Penalty and Protecting Public Safety.” It was the first day of his second term in office.

Trump wrote that for “too long” politicians and judges had sought to undermine “the proper punishment for the vilest crimes.”

Two weeks later, one day after being confirmed as attorney general, Pam Bondi sent a letter to all Justice Department employees that they would start “seeking death sentences in appropriate cases and swiftly implementing those sentences in accordance with the law.”

Federal death penalty cases are not common. The Death Penalty Information Center keeps a database of all death sentences handed out since 1972. In that time, 8,940 individuals have been sentenced to death in the United States, but only 80 were sentenced in federal court.

It is not enough for an individual to be charged federally with murder for the government to seek the death penalty. It has to be tied to an “aggravating factor.”

From the day Boelter was charged, federal prosecutors said the death penalty was on the table. Court hearings were delayed for months while the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Minnesota built its case against him before turning a file over to the Justice Department’s Capital Case section.

During that time, the death penalty case that had been charged against Boelter essentially fell apart because of a controversial decision in another case familiar to Minnesotans: the murder trial of Luigi Mangione for killing UnitedHealthCare CEO Brian Thompson.

On April 1, 2025, Bondi announced that the Justice Department would seek the death penalty against Mangione. His aggravating factor was that the murder was committed alongside another crime of violence: stalking Thompson through interstate facilities, or using the internet, phones or other interstate communication systems in order to track his victim.

Boelter’s murder charges, filed on June 15, 2025, were tied to the same aggravating factor.

In January of this year, Southern District of New York Judge Margaret Garnett dismissed the stalking charges against Mangione, ruling that stalking did not meet the legal definition of a crime of violence. Garnett wrote that she did so expressly to “foreclose the death penalty as an available punishment to be considered by the jury.”

Garnett recognized that her ruling may appear “as tortured and strange” in relation to a case like Mangione, but U.S. Supreme Court precedent forced her to consider “the hypothetically least serious conduct” that could ever be charged as stalking and determine if that conduct was violent.

She said because the criminal definition of stalking could include a person acting recklessly but not intending to cause physical pain or injury to the person they were stalking, it did not meet the strict statutory language of being a “crime of violence.”

Rosen said the ruling led his office to re-examine the case against Boelter, and the DOJ said it agreed with federal prosecutors in Minnesota that an interstate stalking conviction does not constitute eligibility for the death penalty.

There were other aggravating factors under the Death Penalty Act that could have been considered against Boelter, including the simple fact that he committed multiple killings or attempted killings in a single criminal episode.

The pursuit of the death penalty against Boelter in Minnesota would have been historic.

The state abolished it in 1911, five years after a botched hanging. The most notable execution in state history was the hanging of 38 members of the Dakota tribe by the federal government in Mankato following the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862.

The closest the state has come to a death penalty case in recent history was Alfonso Rodriguez Jr. being sentenced to death in North Dakota for the murder of Dru Sjodin, whose body was found outside Crookston, Minn. He was convicted of Sjodin’s murder in 2006 and sentenced to death in 2007. It was later commuted to life in prison.

Boelter’s attacks, and the Trump administration’s more aggressive pursuit of capital punishment, raised the specter of the first death penalty case in more than 100 years in Minnesota. That possibility stirred some of his victims.

J. Carroll Hortman told Judge Tunheim that he was holding onto the hope of getting “that wee, small relief” from seeing Boelter executed.

“I can only count on the biblical promise that the hottest fires of hell are waiting for this guy,” Hortman said. “That cannot come soon enough for me.”

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