It is the 1st of potentially 2 death-related decisions the jury will make.
The jurors — 7 men and 5 women — convicted Bowers June 16 of all 63 federal charges filed against him in connection with the Oct. 27, 2018, shooting.
The synagogue he targeted housed three congregations: Tree of Life, Dor Hadash and New Light. Eleven people were killed: Richard Gottfried, Joyce Fienberg, Rose Mallinger, Jerry Rabinowitz, Cecil and David Rosenthal, Bernice and Sylvan Simon, Daniel Stein, Melvin Wax, and Irving Younger.
On June 26, the trial moved into the penalty phase, which consists of 2 stages: Eligibility and sentence selection. In the eligibility stage, jurors are hearing evidence to determine whether Bowers is, in fact, eligible for the death penalty. Prosecutors must convince jurors that Bowers was able to form the intent to kill, and the crimes included at least one aggravating factor.
If jurors find that prosecutors proved their case, the trial moves to the sentence-selection phase. At that point, they will weigh life and death.
That potential decision comes even as U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland has withdrawn the government’s intent to seek the death penalty against more than two dozen federal defendants and despite Bowers’ numerous attempts to have the death penalty taken off the table in his case.
“The Department of Justice has continued to defend the death sentences that already exist for the men on death row,” said Robin Maher, executive director of the non-partisan Death Penalty Information Center. “The thing to note is that the next administration, if it is not President Biden, could resume executions.
“There is the possibility we could see executions on a scale that there were under President Trump,” she said, referencing a slew of executions in the waning months of Donald Trump’s administration. “A lot can happen between now and then.”
When testimony began May 30, Bowers joined a short list of federal defendants who actually go to trial. Nearly 90% of federal defendants charged with any offense plead guilty, according to a Pew Research analysis of judicial data for fiscal year 2022. Just over 8% have their cases dismissed at some point in the process.
Of the remaining 2.3% who go to trial, they are nearly 5 times as likely to be found guilty as those who are acquitted.
In terms of the death penalty, the numbers are even smaller.
Since 2009, 54 federal death penalty cases have gone to trial, according to data kept by Ms. Maher and the DPIC. In 4 of those cases, defendants pleaded guilty before the trial got to the penalty phase.
Of the 50 other cases, 30 have ended with a life sentence.
“Far more people get a life sentence,” Ms. Maher said.
Zooming out further: According to data from the Federal Death Penalty Resource Council, the federal government sought the death penalty against 508 defendants through 2021 since its reinstatement in 1988. Of those defendants, 254 avoided trial through a plea deal, the judge barring the death penalty, or dismissal of the charges.
Of the capital trials that made it to the sentencing phase, juries imposed a life sentence nearly two-thirds of the time, data shows.
Historical context
In 1972, the Supreme Court’s ruling in Furman v. Georgia nullified all death penalty laws on the books at the time. From the turn of the 20th century through the Furman ruling, 34 people were executed by the federal government. At the time of the Supreme Court decision, there had not been a federal execution since 1963, when then-President John F. Kennedy denied clemency for 28-year-old Victor Feguer.
Those on federal death row at the time had their sentences commuted to life in prison. The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988 reinstated the federal death penalty.
“That was when federal death row began to grow in size,” Ms. Maher said.
Six years later, the Federal Death Penalty Act of 1994 expanded the crimes for which death could be sought, from a short list to 60 offenses.
Sixteen people have been executed by the federal government since then. Between its reinstatement in 1988 and 2003, 3 people were federally executed:
* Timothy McVeigh, 33, was executed June 11, 2001, for the deaths of 8 federal law enforcement officers in the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma. Nearly 170 others were killed in the blast.
* Juan Raul Garza, 44, was executed 8 days after McVeigh for three drug-related murders in Texas in the early 1990s. A federal jury also linked him to at least 5 other killings.
* Louis Jones Jr., 53, was executed March 18, 2003. He was arrested in March 1995 for the kidnapping, rape and murder of a 19-year-old Army soldier, Tracie McBride. She had been attending advanced intelligence training at Goodfellow Air Force Base in Texas.
From 2003 through July 2020, no federal inmates were executed. In 2019, then-Attorney General William Barr ordered the Federal Bureau of Prisons to resume executions after a 17-year hiatus.
“The Justice Department upholds the rule of law,” Mr. Barr said at the time. “And we owe it to the victims and their families to carry forward the sentence imposed by our justice system.
A year later, on July 14, 2020, the government carried out the first of what would total 13 executions over a six-month period. The last execution under the Trump administration was Jan. 16, 2021, four days before Joe Biden’s inauguration. The crimes for which the 13 inmates were executed were committed between 1992 and 2004.
Among the condemned was Lisa Marie Montgomery, who in 2007 was convicted of murdering 23-year-old Bobbie Jo Stinnett in 2004.
Montgomery went to Stinnett’s home Dec. 16, 2004, under the guise of buying a dog. She strangled the pregnant Stinnett and cut her daughter from the dying woman’s womb. The child survived, and Montgomery was arrested the next day.
She was only the 4th woman to be put to death by the U.S. government, and the 1st since Bonnie Heady in 1953.
Heady and Carl Hall were convicted of kidnapping and killing a 6-year-old boy earlier that year. The same year, Ethel Rosenberg and her husband, Julius, were executed after they were convicted of espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union.
The federal death penalty today
As of this month, there are 42 men on death row, most of them held at the U.S. penitentiary in Terre Haute, Ind. The high-security penitentiary holds the government’s lethal-injection execution chamber.
Two federal death row inmates — Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, and Kaboni Savage, a Philadelphia drug lord convicted of 12 counts of racketeering-related murder — are held at ADX Florence, a so-called supermax prison in Fremont County, Colo.
Savage, whose murders include four children killed in a firebombing, is the only federal death row inmate from Pennsylvania. Both he and Tsarnaev will be transferred to Terre Haute when their respective execution dates are set.
Ms. Maher tried to dispel any notion that death row is a comfortable environment.
“The conditions in Terre Haute are extremely harsh and very restrictive. These men are confined to a cell the size of a parking space, where they spend 23 out of 24 hours a day,” she said.
They are not permitted contact visits, and their phone calls are limited.
“This is a permanent solitary confinement condition, and many have been in that solitary confinement for decades,” she said. “This will be a very severe punishment in and of itself, even if it’s many years before it even gets to execution.”
For now, there is a moratorium on federal executions, instituted in 2021. The goal of that moratorium, Attorney General Garland said then, was to allow time to review policies and procedures as they relate to death sentences and executions.
“The Department of Justice must ensure that everyone in the federal criminal justice system is not only afforded the rights guaranteed by the Constitution and laws of the United States, but is also treated fairly and humanely,” he said. “That obligation has special force in capital cases.”
What comes next remains to be seen, Ms. Maher said.
“This process is long and detailed because it should be,” Ms. Maher said. “This is the most severe punishment we can inflict.”
Source: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Staff, July 9, 2023
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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
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted."
— Oscar Wilde