“Guilty” of murders, the author of the worst anti-Semitic attack faces the death penalty

2023-06-16 20:22:09

The jurors deliberated in just five hours. The author of a 2018 attack on a Pittsburgh synagoguethe deadliest against Jews in US history and for which he faces the death penalty, was found guilty of murder on Friday.

Robert Bowers, a 50-year-old white trucker, was accused of carrying out 11 murders in 2018 at the Tree of Life synagogue in this eastern United States city, aggravated by the qualification of an anti-Semitic act. This exceptional trial will now enter a second phase, from June 26, to determine whether the culprit should be sentenced to death or life imprisonment by the federal court of Pennsylvania.

Avoid the death penalty

Beyond the admission of guilt, the issue of this two-part trial is centered on the capital punishment which could be pronounced by the American federal justice. During the investigation phase, lawyers for Robert Bowers had offered in vain to plead “guilty” in exchange for the guarantee that their client would not be sentenced to death. The US Department of Justice refused.

On October 27, 2018, Bowers stormed into Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue armed with three pistols and a semi-automatic assault rifle. Shouting “all Jews must die,” he opened fire and killed 11 people, including a 97-year-old worshiper, in the midst of Shabbat ceremonies in a historic Jewish neighborhood in Pittsburgh, committing the bloodiest attack on Jews in the UNITED STATES.

Before that, he had posted racist, anti-Semitic and anti-immigrant messages on a far-right social network. Then-President Republican Donald Trump had sought the death penalty, a request followed by the then-Justice Department and upheld after Democratic President Joe Biden began his term in office on January 20, 2021.

Antisemitic acts on the rise

But while candidate Biden had pledged in 2020 to abolish the death penalty at the national level, this trial has revived the debates around this supreme punishment still practiced in many American states. As early as 2019, the Pittsburgh federal prosecutor had warned that he would seek the death penalty for Robert Bowers, citing his “lack of remorse” and “his hatred and contempt” for Jews.

During the proceedings of the trial which began at the end of May, his lawyer Judy Clarke had immediately recognized that his client was indeed the man who had shot at the Jews. “There is no point in looking for meaning in a senseless act,” she had defended, seeking above all to save Bowers’ life rather than to plead his innocence.

This trial is being held in the context of a rise in racist and anti-Semitic acts in the United States, which have reached the highest level for 30 years, according to statistics from the federal police, the FBI, cited in April by the Washington Post.

According to the American organization for the fight against anti-Semitism Anti Defamation League, the country had experienced a record number of 2,717 anti-Semitic acts in 2021 (assaults, verbal attacks, material damage, etc.), an increase of 34% over one year. . In 2022, this association counted 3,697 anti-Semitic acts (+36% over one year), unheard of since 1979, according to the Washington Post.