Judge Sentences Pittsburgh Synagogue Gunman to Death

A widow spoke of how her husband went to the Tree of Life synagogue to praise God and was instead riddled with bullets. A police officer described racing to the scene and finding his wounded colleague near other victims’ bodies. A woman who was shot recalled finding a fading pulse on her 97-year-old mother as they cowered together in the chapel.

Survivors of the massacre and relatives of the 11 worshippers who were killed on Oct. 27, 2018, in that Pittsburgh synagogue confronted the gunman in court Thursday with stories of grief, anger and perseverance. Then, U.S. District Judge Robert Colville sentenced the gunman, Robert Bowers, to death, carrying out the decision of the jury in the case.

One by one, the members of a grieving club formed against their will stepped up to a microphone in a fifth-floor courtroom and described the holes left in their lives by the gunman. All the while, Bowers, 50, who had raged against Jewish people during the attack and has shown no remorse since, looked the other way and flipped through a stack of papers.

Daniel Leger, a member of Dor Hadash, one of three congregations in the synagogue that day, was shot in the chest in the attack. He spoke directly to the gunman on Thursday, telling Bowers that he wished he would look up from his papers “long enough to look at me, the Jew he tried to kill.” Bowers did not react.

The judge also handed down a series of consecutive life sentences on many of the other charges that Bowers faced. The jury’s recommendation of death concerned the 22 hate crimes and civil rights offenses connected to the killings that Bowers carried out in the synagogue. But he was convicted on 41 other federal counts, too, including firearms charges.

“Those are counts on which he was found guilty, and therefore he must receive a sentence, and the sentence has to be in accordance with the law,” said David Harris, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law.

In the unlikely event that the death sentence is overturned on appeal, Harris said, Bowers would still be incarcerated on those other sentences.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/03/us/pittsburgh-synagogue-shooting-death-sentence.html">The New York Times</a>.