Jury in Pittsburgh Synagogue Trial Finds Gunman’s Crimes Eligible for Death Penalty

The federal trial of the man who killed 11 people in a Pittsburgh synagogue will move to its final phase next week, after the jury on Thursday found that the crimes the defendant has been convicted of committing were eligible for the death penalty.

The jury’s decision, which was expected, came after 2 1/2 weeks of testimony that largely centered on the motivations of the gunman, Robert Bowers. Mental health experts analyzed scans of the defendant’s brain, discussed the effects of his troubled childhood and recounted interviews with Bowers in which he detailed months of planning before the massacre.

Now, the jury will weigh whether Bowers should be sentenced to death for carrying out what is considered to be the deadliest antisemitic attack in U.S. history.

Capital trials are usually split into a guilt phase and a penalty phase, but in this case, the defense asked the judge to break the penalty phase into two stages — one that concerned his eligibility for the death penalty, which concluded Thursday, and then one that will begin Monday to determine whether to recommend that the judge impose a sentence of death or life in prison.

In the first phase of the federal trial, Bowers’ defense team did not present any witnesses, and never disputed the essential facts of the attack: that on Oct. 27, 2018, he drove to a synagogue where three congregations were meeting for services — Tree of Life, New Light and Dor Hadash — and walked through the building shooting worshippers.

The victims killed were Joyce Fienberg, 75; Richard Gottfried, 65; Rose Mallinger, 97; Daniel Stein, 71; Melvin Wax, 87; Irving Younger, 69; Dr. Jerry Rabinowitz, 66; the couple Bernice, 84, and Sylvan Simon, 86; and brothers Cecil, 59, and David Rosenthal, 54.

Six more people were wounded, including four police officers.

Bowers was found guilty on 63 counts, including hate crimes that carry a maximum sentence of death. The central question facing jurors over the last 2 1/2 weeks was whether Bowers intended to kill his victims — one of the factors necessary for a death sentence. Bowers’ attorneys called a series of experts in psychology and neurology to testify, in an effort to make a case that severe mental disease made him incapable of forming a conscious intent to kill.

“The issue in this case is, what happens when your brain is broken?” said Michael Burt, a defense attorney, in his closing argument. “What happens when you don’t have the ability to know what is truth and what is not truth?”

Defense witnesses who had examined Bowers said he had schizophrenia and other serious mental disorders. They testified that he had signs of “permanent brain damage,” that he suffered from paranoia and delusions, and that his assertion that he was a savior of the white race was so divorced from reality that it showed him to be “blatantly psychotic.”

Dr. Siddhartha Nadkarni, a neurologist who reviewed Bowers’ medical records, said that the defendant, who is 50, had been involuntarily committed to psychiatric facilities three times and had attempted to kill himself at least once. He also said that as a child, Bowers experienced hallucinations and once tried to set his mother on fire.

“I think he’s unable to interpret the world correctly, or inhibit behavior based on his misinterpretations,” Nadkarni said, adding that Bowers’ mental afflictions and his paranoia created a kind of “kindling” that could have been stoked by, among other things, virulently antisemitic posts on social media.

Expert witnesses for the prosecution disputed many of these contentions. They described Bowers as an isolated man who had been emotionally abused as a child, but who was neither seriously mentally ill nor delusional. Some of his most extreme beliefs about Jewish people, immigrants and white supremacy were not the creations of his own mind, one expert witness said, but were shared by “thousands and thousands of people” in online forums and right-wing radio broadcasts.

“The defense experts who testified that the defendant had delusions,” said the witness, Dr. Park Dietz, a forensic psychiatrist who has been consulted in a number of high-profile capital cases, “simply mistook very ordinary widespread white separatist beliefs for delusions because they weren’t familiar with them.”

Through the testimony, a detailed portrait emerged of the defendant’s planning before the synagogue attack.

Under lengthy cross-examination by prosecutors, Richard Rogers, a forensic psychologist called by the defense, said that Bowers told him he had begun preparing for an attack six months before he carried it out, and that he had considered other targets, including a Jewish center near the synagogue and an unnamed Jewish person who lived in Cleveland.

At one point, Rogers testified, the defendant said he had thought of pumping poisonous gas into the synagogue, but decided that the plan was impractical. He told Rogers that he shot some of his victims in the abdomen because he wanted what he called “messy kills.” Years after the attack, Rogers testified, Bowers believed that he deserved a parade and medals for what he had done.

Relatives of some of those who had been killed also testified in the eligibility phase of the trial, describing how old age, physical ailments or developmental disabilities had made most of the victims particularly vulnerable — one of several aggravating factors that can make a crime eligible for the death penalty.

In the trial’s final phase, the jury will hear detailed testimony about Bowers’ life beyond the episodes that experts briefly discussed in the eligibility phase. Jurors will also hear about the lives of the people he killed and the impact of their loss on their families and the community.

To recommend the death penalty, there must be a unanimous vote of the 12 jurors; otherwise, Bowers will face a federal sentence of life in prison. He is facing state charges as well, including 11 counts of murder, but the local district attorney is holding those charges in abeyance while the federal criminal proceedings are in progress.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/13/us/pittsburgh-synagogue-trial-gunman-death-penalty.html">The New York Times</a>.