The Robert Bowers trial is testing my opposition to capital sentences
Thoughts as we await a sentencing decision on Robert Bowers
On one of those Saturdays in late October where the damp chill of the early winter air penetrates your layers of outerwear, I was on the train home to London from Bath. Over the raucous of inebriated rugby fans celebrating a win or a loss, I've never been sure, I tried to hear what my mom was saying over the phone.
There had been a shooting at a synagogue in Pittsburgh.
It was the type of news that was impossible to comprehend at the moment. The night before, I had been at my London synagogue, Western Marble Arch, singing Lecha Dodi and eating cookies with the people who had become my safe space during my time in that city. Despite the many security protocols in place at Western Marble Arch, and every other synagogue or Jewish event I had ever attended, the possibility of anything actually happening felt beyond remote.
Back in my Islington flat, I sat on my bed watching the death toll in Pittsburgh rise to 11. I read reports of how the shooter, Robert Bowers, had published an Antisemitic manifesto online before laying siege to the Squirrel Hill synagogue. I read the Facebook testimonials of the Jewish doctors and nurses who treated Bowers for his injuries after he was shot by police.
In October 2018, I didn’t think about what would happen to Bowers. The Tree of Life Shooting was a cataclysmic event that changed the way I, and so many other Jews, regarded the growing threat of Antisemitism in the Diaspora, and our relationship with our community and houses of worship. I viewed Bowers’ culpability as so evident that it did not cross my mind that he would one day need to stand trial for his actions.
I’m almost embarrassed to admit that it somewhat caught me by surprise when on May 25, 2023, five years after the deadliest attack on Jews in American history, jury selection began for the trial of Robert Bowers. Bowers was charged with 63 federal and 36 state crimes, including capital crimes.
Bowers, who had previously attempted to negotiate a plea bargain in exchange for a commuted sentence in 2019, pleaded not guilty when his trial began this spring, and on June 16, 2023, the jury returned a guilty verdict on all 63 federal crimes. The state crimes will be tried at a later date in a Pennsylvania state court. Now, the court will turn its attention to sentencing and the jury will be tasked with deciding whether or not to apply the death penalty. This trajectory is in line with what was evidently predicted at the outset of the trial. As is common with cases like this where a heavy focus on sentencing is likely and the death penalty is on the table, questions around comfort in potentially applying such a sentence was a major focus of the jury selection process.
When the news broke last Friday that the court would be moving on to sentencing, I knew that there was some urgency in getting my thoughts on paper. Specifically, I wanted to write what you are reading now before the jury returns a decision on sentencing.
Unlike most of the times that I discuss legal cases here, we are not going to talk about the legal mechanisms or arguments for or against different potential sentencing options for Bowers or the merit of mitigating factors that defense counsel plans to argue. Instead, I want to talk about the death penalty.
Canada de facto abolished capital sentences in 1963. However, this did not put an end to debates over whether or not the death penalty should exist, making it a topic I have had ample opportunity to think about. I have always been opposed to the death penalty. I could give a whole list of, probably easily refutable, reasons why I have always believed in other options, but the simplest and most honest thing to say is that I don’t believe that we have the right to play Gd in the lives of others. I am comfortable playing judge and jury, but not executioner.
Now, my convictions are being tested.
Robert Bowers murdered 11 innocent people, including Holocaust survivors, and injured 6 others, for the crime of being Jewish. It’s not something that was ever supposed to happen in America, where Jews came to be free from the violence that repeatedly upended their lives in Europe and the Middle East. He forever changed how Jews in North America perceive their physical safety and caused a ripple effect of further attacks against American Jews.
Robert Bowers stole 11 lives. I don’t believe in the death penalty. Can I beg an eye for an eye?
I struggle with the thought that taxpayer dollars will go to keeping Bowers alive if the jury comes back with a life sentence. It sends a chill down my spine to think that from prison he could continue to write similar manifestos to the one that he posted before going to Tree of Life Synagogue, which will be discovered and shared within the community of individuals who supported his actions and beyond. I hate the idea that even from behind the walls of a prison he will have the opportunity to eat food, read books, and see sunshine, all things that the 11 Jews he murdered will never do again.
This narrative, of a mass shooter standing trial for their actions in America is not one that I am used to. In almost every other case of a mass shooting in my living memory, the gunman either killed themself or was killed by police at the scene of the crime. Now, we the people are having to decide whether a person who committed a mass shooting should be sentenced to death.
I want so badly to remain true to my moral position; that I have always opposed the death penalty. I don’t want to create different rules when the violence was carried out against my community. But it’s really hard.
I don’t believe in the death penalty. But I don’t want to preserve the life of Robert Bowers.