Judaism has traditionally been of 2 minds about capital punishment. It exists in Jewish law, but has rarely been used and is strongly discouraged.
The Torah and other texts of rabbinical Judaism say it's okay, but under only limited circumstances. In the wake of Saturday's shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue, both state and federal prosecutors plan to move forward with capital murder charges against suspect Robert Bowers.
Federal death sentences are relatively rare, and most death-penalty activity is carried out at the state or local level. There have been only 3 executions since the federal death penalty was reinstated in 1988.
Many would say that Bowers, 46, who police say left 11 dead and many others wounded, undoubtedly deserves the death penalty. But not all rabbis from the 3 major Jewish movements agree.
The Torah has capital crimes from murder to profaning the sabbath; there's a section where a man was put to death for gathering wood on Shabbat.
But Jewish law doesn't start and stop with the Torah's text.
Like the American criminal justice system, the Torah draws a distinction between intentional homicide and non-intentional homicide, instructing that capital punishment is appropriate only in the former.
The text creates a set of Jewish evidentiary standards to prove that the accused truly intended to commit murder.
Capital cases were once heard by a Jewish court known as the Sanhedrin, made up of either 23 or 70 rabbis. Unanimous verdicts were forbidden, for someone always needed to speak on behalf of the accused. Although the tribunal typically rendered a verdict when there was a margin of 1 vote, capital cases required a majority of plus-2.
The tribunal could not impose a death sentence unless and until they heard from 2 eyewitnesses. Both needed to see each other at the time of the offense and have warned the assailant of the consequences of his action. Both also needed to hear the perpetrator's verbal assent.
Officially, all prominent Jewish movements oppose capital punishment, most of them in all cases, according to Pew Research Center.
Although many rabbis soft-pedal those positions when an individual commits a horrific act, the proper religious response, they say, is neither to take another person's life nor decide for the state to do so. Even the synagogue gunman, according to them, does not deserve the death penalty.
Barbara Weinstein, associate director of the Religious Action Center, an advocacy arm of Reform Judaism, said the movement opposed the state's use of the death penalty as a matter of principle. Moral concerns have led the movement to worry the justice system applies punishments unequally.
"It's hard to find words to capture the pain felt across the Jewish community, but as broken as our hearts are, we continue to believe there are no crimes where the taking of a human life is justified," she said.
Yet, she added, the gunman should still be held accountable.
According to Shmuly Yanklowitz, a modern Orthodox rabbi and founder of a progressive-minded Orthodox rabbinical association, the Orthodox movement "is certainly in opposition toward capital punishment, with exception."
But, he said, "when dealing with a gentile society and government, we're no longer dealing formally with the Jewish legal system and largely move from law to ethics. There, they become somewhat intertwined with our personal politics. It breaks down more on party lines than denomination lines."
Rabbi Julie Schonfeld, chief executive of the Rabbinical Assembly, the premier international membership organization of Conservative rabbis, similarly told The Washington Post that for decades the organization maintained the committee on Jewish laws and standards, which debates how to apply law and tradition in an evolving contemporary society. A more recent opinion shifted its stance to allow sitting on a jury where the death penalty was being debated.
Rabbi Jeremy Kalmanofsky, a Conservative rabbi and member of the committee, reiterated, "the death penalty has not existed as a judicially appropriate outcome for more than 2,000 years. It is bad policy. In modern states, we shouldn't put people to death unless it's the only way to prevent them from causing more crime," he said.
Kalmanofsky highlights the complex relationship Jews have with the idea of capital punishment through the execution of Otto Adolf Eichmann, a high-ranking member of Nazi leadership responsible for Jewish extermination camps. Eichmann, who was hanged in 1962, is the only person that the state of Israel has ever executed judicially.
"As a Jew, it's hard to argue that Eichmann didn't deserve execution. Killing Nazis in the wake of the Holocaust makes for rough justice," Kalmanofsky said, yet Eichmann no longer presented a threat of future crime.
Tree of Life Rabbi Jeffrey Myers told The Post that in light of the horror to his congregation, he was not yet ready to talk about Bowers, adding that "in the Conservative movement, each rabbi will make a decision in an individual congregation."
In one sense, that this happened in the open and diverse community of the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh was shocking, but in another sense, this surprises few. American Jews have always been aware that anti-Semitism is a part of Western civilization, Yanklowitz said.
"When you have a moment to step back, you'll have difficulty finding mainstream Jewish rabbis endorsing death," Yanklowitz said.
Source: Washington Post, November 1, 2018
Death penalty cases tick back up under President Trump
Before a suspect was even publicly named, President Donald Trump declared that whoever gunned down 11 people in a Pittsburgh synagogue should "suffer the ultimate price" and that the death penalty should be brought back "into vogue."
Mr. Trump has largely gotten his wish, at least on the federal level, with death penalty cases ticking back up under his Justice Department after a near-moratorium on such prosecutions in President Barack Obama's last term, when he directed a broad review of capital punishment and issues surrounding lethal injection.
Mr. Trump's attorney general, Jeff Sessions, has so far approved at least a dozen death penalty prosecutions over the past 2 years, according to court filings tracked by the Federal Death Penalty Resource Counsel, with cases ranging from the high profile to the relatively obscure.
They include the man charged with using a rented truck to fatally mow down 8 people on a New York City bike path a year ago; 3 men charged in a fatal armored truck robbery in New Orleans; a gang suspect in Detroit charged with "murder in aid of racketeering"; and a man charged with fatally shooting a tribal police officer in New Mexico on the nation's largest American Indian reservation.
The tally could grow higher over the next 2 months as federal prosecutors await Sessions' decision in several other cases, including against the alleged synagogue shooter, Robert Bowers, who faces federal hate crime charges and 11 counts of murder.
By comparison, in Obama's final year in office the Justice Department authorized just 1 capital prosecution, that of Dylann Roof, the white supremacist who fatally shot 9 black people in 2015 during a church service in Charleston, South Carolina.
But while the Justice Department under Mr. Trump has increased death penalty prosecutions, the numbers are not entirely out of line with those earlier in the Obama administration under Attorney General Eric Holder, who approved 11 capital prosecutions in 2009 and at least 13 in 2012.
And both the Trump and Obama administrations pale in comparison to that of President George W. Bush and his attorney general John Ashcroft, who in 2003 alone signed off on capital prosecutions against more than 3 dozen defendants, at times overruling his own prosecutors when they recommended against seeking capital punishment.
What makes Mr. Trump different, death penalty experts say, is that he publicly advocates for the ultimate punishment in specific cases.
"I think they should very much bring the death penalty into vogue," he told reporters Saturday shortly after news broke of the synagogue shooting. "Anybody that does a thing like this to innocent people that are in temple or in church. We had so many incidents with churches. They should really suffer the ultimate price."
And he took to Twitter just a day after last year's Manhattan bike path attack to call suspect Sayfullo Saipov a "Degenerate Animal" and argue he "SHOULD GET DEATH PENALTY!"
Mr. Trump also said this year that capital punishment should be used to prosecute drug traffickers. Sessions followed a day later with a memo urging prosecutors to seek the death penalty "for certain drug-related crimes," including killings occurring during drug trafficking.
"If we're to be a nation of laws, then the legal process has to be allowed to play itself out without being subject to political manipulation," said Robert Dunham, executive director of the Washington-based Death Penalty Information Center. "Charging decisions should be made based on the evidence, not based on politics and not based on political pressure."
The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment.
Mr. Trump was a vocal proponent of the death penalty for decades before taking office, most notably in 1989 when the real estate magnate took out full-page advertisements in New York City newspapers urging elected officials to "BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY" following the rape and sexual assault of a jogger in Central Park. "If the punishment is strong," he wrote at the time, "the attacks on innocent people will stop."
Polls show a majority of Americans still back the death penalty, but support has been declining in recent years. A 2017 Gallup poll showed 55 % of Americans supported the death penalty for a person convicted or murder, the lowest percentage in 45 years.
The death penalty remains legal in 30 states, but only a handful regularly conduct executions. Texas has executed 108 prisoners since 2010, far more than any other state.
But such executions on the federal level have been rare. The government has put to death only three defendants since restoring the federal death penalty in 1988, the most recent of which occurred in 2003, when Louis Jones was executed for the 1995 kidnapping, rape and murder of a young female soldier.
In 2014, following a botched state execution in Oklahoma, Obama directed the Justice Department to conduct a broad review of capital punishment and issues surrounding lethal injection drugs. It remains unclear today what came of that review and whether it will change the way the federal government carries out executions.
The U.S. Bureau of Prisons did not respond to requests for comment.
Mr. Trump himself railed against this disconnect between prosecutions and actual executions in his comments after the Pittsburgh attack.
"They shouldn't have to wait years and years," he said. "Now the lawyers will get involved, and everybody's going to get involved, and we'll be 10 years down the line."
Source: CBS news, November 1, 2018
Death penalty cases rare in federal court; executions more rare
Death penalty cases are relatively rare in the federal courts system and executions even more rare.
Only three people have been executed since the federal death penalty was reinstated in 1988; the vast majority of the nation's capital cases are handled at the state level.
But in either jurisdiction, the appeals process is long and involved and the will to impose the ultimate sanction seems to have dwindled over the years.
President Donald Trump supports the death penalty but it's not clear if that will translate into more federal executions.
If it does, accused synagogue shooter Robert Bowers would seem to be a likely candidate for lethal injection at the federal death chamber in Terre Haute, Ind.
He is only the 4th defendant in the history of Western Pennsylvania's federal district, which comprises 25 counties, to face the federal death penalty.
None of the others was executed.
The only 3 federal inmates to be put to death in modern times are Timothy McVeigh, Juan Garza and Louis Jones, all of whom were executed in the early 2000s when George W. Bush was president.
McVeigh, who blew up the Oklahoma City federal building in 1995, was executed in 2001. Garza, a marijuana dealer who killed 3 other dealers in Texas in 1993, was also executed in 2001. And Jones, a Gulf War veteran who kidnapped and murdered a female soldier in Texas in 1995, was executed in 2003.
In all, 78 defendants nationwide have been sentenced to death since 1988.
3 locals - Joseph Minerd, Lawrence Skiba and Jelani Solomon - have all faced possible execution initially but none was sentenced to death.
Minerd was the 1st.
In 1999, he used a pipe bomb to blow up a house in Connellsville to kill his pregnant ex-girlfriend because she refused to get an abortion. Her 3-year-old daughter also died. A federal jury in Pittsburgh convicted him but spared him execution in 2002. Now 63, he is serving life at a federal prison in New Hampshire.
Lawrence Skiba of White Oak hired a hitman to kill a McKeesport used-car dealer in 2000 so he could collect insurance money. He originally faced the death penalty but pleaded guilty and cooperated against the hitman, Eugene DeLuca, in exchange for the chance to get out of prison someday. Now 65, he's due to be released from the federal prison in Loretto, Pa., in 2020.
Jelani Solomon of Beaver Falls ordered the 2004 contract killing of a witness against him on the eve of his drug trial. A jury convicted him of using a gun during a drug trafficking crime resulting in death and conspiracy to distribute cocaine but spared him the death penalty. Now 39, he is serving 2 life terms at the federal prison in McKean.
No one can say if Mr. Bowers will end up on federal death row.
But David Harris, a University of Pittsburgh law professor, said the Justice Department is more likely under Mr. Trump to pursue the death penalty in general and that fact alone increases the odds that someone - maybe Mr. Bowers - will be executed someday.
Still, the final decision is in the hands of a jury, not a prosecutor or a judge. And in some instances the victims may not want the death penalty. Prosecutors don't have to abide by those wishes because they represent the people as a whole, not the victims, but they will take victim families into account.
"They always consider it," said Mr. Harris. "They're not, frankly, controlled by it."
The federal prosecution of Dylann Roof is probably the closest parallel to Mr. Bowers' case.
Roof, a white supremacist, was sentenced to death last year for the hate-driven killing of 9 parishioners at a black church in Charleston, S.C., in 2015. But the families of his victims have said they do not want him to be executed because of their Christian beliefs.
Mr. Harris said it's too early to know whether the same dynamic will play out with Mr. Bowers' Jewish victims.
It's hard to predict how long it will take for Mr. Bowers to go to trial or if he goes to trial at all. The vast majority of federal defendants, about 95 percent, plead guilty.
Even if he is convicted and sentenced to death, however, the appeals process is likely to take years. State death penalty cases afford defendants a double layer of appeals, in which an inmate first exhausts state appeals and then starts the process again in the federal courts through a habeas petition.
The federal system is less complex because there is no state involvement and because Congress and the Supreme Court have been trying to streamline the process. 2 years after the Oklahoma City bombing, for example, President Clinton signed the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, which covers both state and federal prisoners. It established stricter filing deadlines, limited evidentiary hearings and allowed a prisoner to file only a single habeas petition.
Despite those measures, appeals still take time as inmates pursue any number of arguments, from ineffective counsel to prosecutorial misconduct. And sometimes those claims are validated.
"The gears of the justice system turn slowly, and this is not entirely inappropriate," Mr. Harris said. "This is something you want to get right. You're talking about the state [or federal government] taking someone's life."
Support for the death penalty has been dropping for decades. Slightly less than 1/2 of Americans now support it, down from 80 % in the mid-1990s. Former President Barack Obama called the practice "deeply troubling."
While most people are familiar with the death penalty as it applies in state homicide cases, there are about 60 federal crimes that also provide for the death penalty, such as murder for hire, murder during a kidnapping or murder committed during a drug-trafficking crime.
In Mr. Bowers' case, the charges include obstruction of exercise of religious beliefs resulting in death and use of a gun to commit murder during a crime of violence.
Use of the death penalty is authorized by the Justice Department in consultation with the local U.S. attorney's office. Almost all federal prisoners on death row - 62 as of this week - are housed at Terre Haute. Many states have just 1 or 2 defendants on federal death row. Texas has the most by far with 13. Pennsylvania has 1.
The state has many people on death row in its prisons but, like the federal government, hasn't executed anyone in decades. The last executions were in the 1990s.
Source: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, November 1, 2018
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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde
