PITTSBURGH — Jurors in the trial of the gunman who killed 11 Jewish worshipers in a Pittsburgh synagogue took less than two hours to find him eligible for the death penalty, setting up a final phase of the historic proceedings in which the gunman may be sentenced to death.
The Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, June 26, 2023. (Ron Kampeas)
On July 13, the seven women and five men on the jury unanimously found that Robert Bowers, who attacked the Tree of Life building on Oct. 27, 2018, met all four thresholds of intent necessary for capital punishment.
The jurors also agreed with the government’s case that the crime carried four aggravating factors that exacerbate the crime.
They rejected the defense’s argument that the shooter’s anti-Semitism was a product of delusions.
Last month, on June 16, the jury found the defendant guilty of 63 crimes, including 22 capital crimes — two for each fatality.
The final phase of the trial began on Monday, July 17. In that portion, the jury is to decide whether to deliver a sentence of death or life imprisonment without possibility of release.
In that phase, the jury will hear impact statements from some family members of the 11 people murdered by the gunman.
Jurors will also hear from people who were injured or otherwise affected.
Prosecutors said they expected to bring seven witnesses over two to three days.
The defense will then bring witnesses for mitigating factors, which lawyers said they expected to last five to seven days. Those witnesses are expected to describe the hardships the gunman suffered over his lifetime.
The alacrity of the verdict — jurors met for about an hour after closing arguments on July 12, and less than an hour the next morning — suggests they summarily rejected arguments advanced by the defense that the gunman’s anti-Semitism was a sign that he was delusional.
Expert psychiatric witnesses for both sides who interviewed the shooter recently say he has no regrets, and the defense sought to use that fact to bolster its medical arguments that he was schizophrenic and did not have the intent to kill required for a death sentence.
In his bid to keep his client off of death row, a lawyer for the gunman claimed there was “no culture” that endorses killing Jews.
That assertion came during closing arguments on July 12, in which defense attorney Michael Burt devoted a large portion of his 90-minute argument to rebutting the claim that the shooter’s anti-Semitism was not delusional but the product of his white supremacist subculture.
That idea was laid out over three days of testimony by the prosecution’s star witness, Park Dietz, a forensic psychiatrist.
Defense attorney Burt argued:
“There is no culture that sanctions that you need to kill people to save humanity from an invasion from Jewish groups — that is delusional thinking, it’s not political discourse, in our view.”
The gunman professed belief in what is known as “replacement theory,” a white supremacist idea that says Jews are orchestrating an invasion of immigrants of color in order to supplant white Americans. He cited that idea on social media shortly before the attack, and it also animated chants at the 2017 neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville.
Watchdogs say it has become increasingly popular on the far right.
The gunman’s persistence in his belief in a Jewish threat, defense lawyer Burt argued, is evidence of the gunman’s mental illness. In recent months, the defendant has told psychiatrists, including those called by the defense, that he continues to ascribe to his anti-Semitic views, and has expressed pride in the attack he carried out.
“Even in capital custody he can’t keep himself from vocalizing these delusions he has, of the country invaded, that he is a soldier at war, that he has a moral imperative to kill Jews — all these crazy delusions,” Burt said.
In his own argument on July 12, US Attorney Eric Olshan argued that the shooter drew his thoughts not from his troubled psyche but from external sources.
Olshan started with a reference to Gab, a social media site where the defendant maintained an active account.
“Gab.com told the defendant he had to act and act now,” Olshan said. “He wasn’t even creative. He didn’t come up with any of this on his own, he went to the menu of available white supremacist ideologies and he picked the one he most agreed with.”
The beliefs that he ascribed to “are well known anti-Semitic tropes that have been around for centuries,” Olshan said. “The defendant’s beliefs are widely held and shared among his subculture. Not one of his extreme beliefs originated from his own mind.”
Where’s the killer’s picture?
Readers may have noticed that the Intermountain Jewish News has not printed a picture of the Pittsburgh synagogue shooter in the great bulk of its coverage of this event and of his trial.
“It is more than a question of not providing mass killers and anti-Semitic killers (in the Pittsburgh case, they are one and the same) the notoreity they so deeply crave — even posthumously, if they commit suicide,” says IJN Editor and Publisher Rabbi Hillel Goldbeg.
“It is also a question of removing, to the extent possible, the glamour that might motivate another evil mind to do the same.”