Pennsylvania | Lawyers for accused synagogue shooter cite new Colorado law in renewed attack on death penalty

Lawyers for Robert Bowers, accused of killing 11 worshipers at Tree of Life synagogue in 2018, are citing Colorado's new law abolishing the death penalty in an effort to spare Mr. Bowers from federal execution.

Colorado abolished the death penalty on Monday, becoming the 22nd state to do so since the reinstatement of capital punishment in 1976.

Lawyers for Mr. Bowers say the Colorado law represents a "clear and dominant trend of death penalty abolition among the states" and that the federal government should follow suit.

The lawyers — public defenders Michael Novara and Elisa Long and anti-death penalty lawyer Judy Clarke — are asking U.S. District Judge Donetta Ambrose to grant their motion to strike the death penalty as a sentence option on the grounds that it violates the U.S. Constitution.

"Our nation is walking away from capital punishment," they said in a motion filed Tuesday. "Colorado’s abolition of the death penalty is the most recent event in this consistent trend. This court should recognize our society’s evolving standards of decency and grant Mr. Bowers’ motion."

The request is the latest by the lawyers in attacking the federal death penalty, which the Justice Department has said it will seek should Mr. Bowers be convicted in U.S. District Court.

In previous arguments, the defense has said capital punishment violates the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment; the ban on cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment; and the anti-commandeering provision of the 10th Amendment. They have also said that under a 2002 Supreme Court decision in an Arizona case that under the Sixth Amendment, a jury has to find aggravating factors necessary for imposing the death penalty as spelled out in an indictment. The Justice Department charged Mr. Bowers and later filed notice that it would seek death.

Ms. Clarke, who has represented other high-profile defendants in federal capital cases, has also raised other issues consistent with anti-death penalty arguments, saying that the death penalty is unreliable, imposed disproportionately on minorities and applied capriciously.

Mr. Bowers is the fourth defendant in the history of the Western District of Pennsylvania, comprising 25 counties, to face the federal death penalty. None of the others was executed. The last federal defendant to be executed was Louis Jones, a Gulf War veteran who kidnapped and killed a female soldier in Texas in 1995. He was put to death in 2003.

Source: post-gazette.com, Torsten Ove, March 25, 2020

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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

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