PITTSBURGH — The Pittsburgh synagogue shooter is eligible for the death penalty, a jury decided Thursday, setting the stage for the trial to move forward to the next phase where jurors will ultimately decide whether he gets sentenced to death.
The jurors — seven women and five men — deliberated for about two hours over the course of two days. They signaled to U.S. District Judge Robert J. Colville about 9:30 a.m. that they’d reached a verdict.
Robert Bowers, 50, was convicted June 16 of all 63 federal charges against him. Twenty-two of those charges are capital offenses.
Jurors found that prosecutors proved Bowers’ attack was premeditated and that he formed intent to kill in all 22 capital offenses — two each for each of the 11 victims who were killed: Richard Gottfried, Joyce Fienberg, Rose Mallinger, Jerry Rabinowitz, Cecil and David Rosenthal, Bernice and Sylvan Simon, Daniel Stein, Melvin Wax and Irving Younger.
Maggie Feinstein, director of the 10.27 Healing Partnership, said the 11 victims cannot speak for themselves, and so it is up to their living family members to speak for them.
“In the next phase of the trial, our justice system will perform its duty to listen to their voices,” she said. “We support them and we will stand with them.”
Attorneys for both sides made their final pitches to jurors Wednesday after a delayed start to the day.
“On Oct. 27, 2018, the defendant intended to kill every Jew he could hunt down in the Tree of Life synagogue,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Soo C. Song told jurors in her closing argument for the government.
The question at the core of the eligibility phase is whether Bowers had the capacity to truly form the intent to kill.
He absolutely intended to kill that morning, Ms. Song said, and he planned it and he knew what he was doing. He’d told defense expert Richard Rogers as much — he said he’d aimed for his victims’ midsections so as to inflict “messy shots” that would leave the most “goo.”
“In the interest of justice,” she told jurors, “find this defendant eligible for the most severe penalty under the law — a sentence of death — for killing Joyce Fienberg. For killing Richard Gottfried. For killing Rose Mallinger. For killing Jerry Rabinowitz. For killing Cecil and David Rosenthal. For killing Bernice and Sylvan Simon. For killing Daniel Stein. For killing Melvin Wax. And for killing Irving Younger.”
To find Bowers eligible, jurors must unanimously agree that he had the capacity to truly form the intent to kill and at least one of four aggravating factors: that Bowers created a grave risk of death to others; the crime involved substantial planning and premeditation; those killed were particularly vulnerable because of their age or physical or intellectual disabilities and there were multiple killings or attempted killings.
“The evidence answers those questions for you — yes,” she said.
Defense attorney Michael N. Burt disagreed. He said Ms. Song left out an important word when she referenced the decision jurors must make: Whether Bowers had an intent to kill. What they actually must decide, he said, is whether he had a conscious attempt to kill.
“The real issue of the case,” he said, “has to do with the brain and what we can say about Mr. Bowers’ brain.”
He pointed to myriad defense experts who testified for days earlier this month, several of whom concluded that Bowers had schizophrenia. One said he showed signs of epilepsy as well.
“What we’ve tried to do in this phase of the case is provide you with the reason that we think explained how this horrible crime could’ve happened,” Burt said.
