In a rare and largely unprecedented move for a death penalty case, Kosowski represented himself, waiving his right to a jury trial and allowing a judge in Pinellas County, Florida, to decide his fate.
Prosecutors presented the state’s case over six days, laying out for the judge how the former plastic surgeon accosted Steven Cozzi in the bathroom of his law office on a Tuesday morning, and Cozzi was never seen again.
Kosowski, 47, did not present a case in his own defense but spoke directly to the judge in his closing argument to suggest prosecutors did not prove the statutory elements of first-degree murder. In a soft voice, leaning into the microphone, Kosowski spoke for about 20 minutes.
He pointed to the lack of a body or death certificate ruling Cozzi deceased. He mocked the prosecution’s theory of the murder and disposal of Cozzi’s body, speaking in the first person.
“Now, I committed this murder in a common area, in the bathroom, in the middle of a busy office complex,” Kosowski said. “No one heard a thing. No one saw anything, despite there being people literally 10 to 20 feet within that bathroom. I proceed to clean that bathroom. I load Steven Cozzi’s body onto a cart. I roll it out, and I load the cart with Steven Cozzi’s body in it, with superhuman strength, onto that truck, and then I drive off.”
“Not only is it impossible physically to do what the state asserts is required of anybody, let alone me, it makes no sense in time,” Kosowski told the judge.
After Kosowski’s closing argument, Judge Joseph Bulone noted that typically “the jurors go back and deliberate … and they reach a verdict and they check the appropriate box, and we’re done.”
But in this case, it’s up to him.
“I don’t anticipate me disagreeing with myself that much,” Bulone said. “So, we’ll take a 15-minute break, and I’ll be back.”
Bulone as the lone fact finder considered surveillance video, DNA findings, and evidence of Kosowski’s growing fixation with Cozzi to swiftly determine the defendant’s guilt. The case now moves on to the penalty phase. The judge will rule whether Kosowski gets life in prison or is put to death.
Self-representation in capital cases is very rare and never advisable because it typically doesn’t end in a favorable outcome for the defendant, Death Penalty Information Center executive director Robin Maher told CNN.
“Most examples of pro se representation in capital cases have ended with convictions and death sentences,” Maher said.
He’s represented himself before
This is not the first time Kosowski, who holds several advanced degrees including a medical degree from Dartmouth College, opted to litigate on his own behalf. In 2019, he sued former colleagues over a billing dispute, and in 2022 Kosowski started representing himself, putting him in direct dealings with the doctors’ attorneys—including Cozzi.
Kosowski expressed animus for Cozzi as the civil proceedings stretched over years and plotted his murder for months before Cozzi disappeared in March 2023, prosecutors say.
On March 21, 2023, Cozzi went to the restroom down the hall from his office, leaving an email draft open and music playing from his phone.
Cozzi never returned to his desk, and his colleagues reported him missing hours later.
Prosecutors allege Kosowski waited there for the lawyer and killed him in the bathroom before dragging Cozzi’s body out of the building in a cart.
Surveillance footage shows a man enter the building and hours later—wearing different clothes—drag a cart toward the parking lot.
Kosowski joined a 10:30 a.m. virtual hearing for their mutual case from the law firm parking lot, minutes after getting Cozzi’s body out of the building, according to prosecutors.
The doctor moved for sanctions against Cozzi, seeking to remove the lawyer from the case, but Cozzi wasn’t on the call, prompting other firm members to look for him.
Cozzi’s colleague eventually checked the office bathroom, which overwhelmingly smelled of cleaning products and alcohol. There was blood on the walls, the toilet seat, and the floor, Jake Blanchard, a friend and mentor, testified.
After a stop at his waterfront home, Kosowski took Cozzi’s body to a dumpster on a remote road nearly four hours away, prosecutors allege, and continued to Miami, where he performed scheduled surgeries the next day.
The dumpster was emptied at a landfill two days later. Investigators were too late to recover any evidence of Cozzi. Cozzi’s remains and any other evidence were never recovered, but the garbage truck driver who emptied the dumpster that day testified he still recalls the “vile” smell he couldn’t shake after stopping at the dumpster.
Kosowski was arrested four days after the killing with nearly $300,000 in cash, two passports, and a “murder bag” in his trunk, Assistant State Attorney Alexandra Spadaro said in opening statements.
The duffel bag had masks, brass knuckles, a taser, a crowbar, and a syringe with succinylcholine, Spadaro said. The paralytic can be lethal at the right dose, but at a lower dose it affects a person’s ability to resist—weakening the body so they can’t fight back but still feel everything that happens to them, trial evidence showed.
Video of the arrest shown in court captured the doctor in the back of a squad car sucking meticulously on each of his fingers after he wriggled his cuffed wrists from behind his body underneath his feet into his lap. He also had several bruises and scrapes all over his body, photos shown in court revealed.
Cozzi’s blood was found in the bed of Kosowski’s pickup truck and on a ballistic vest in the trunk of Kosowski’s second car, DNA results submitted at trial confirmed.
Contentious civil litigation turns into an “obsession”
Cozzi’s husband and colleagues testified about his loving demeanor and upstanding professional ethics. Kosowski was the only person known to have a problem with Cozzi; they all told law enforcement at the time, quickly making the surgeon a person of interest in Cozzi’s disappearance.
Kosowski allegedly confronted Cozzi in the law office bathroom months earlier, on a break during a tense deposition for the civil case.
“He just called me a scumbag like the clients I represent,” Cozzi wrote in an email to his colleague immediately after the January incident.
Cozzi’s husband testified he was afraid of Kosowski after hearing about the aggressive confrontation. He got Cozzi pepper spray and fixed their home security camera.
“Practicing law is adversarial, but this did not feel the same as other cases that he was working on. It felt like it had gone outside of that normal scope, so… I started becoming afraid,” Michael Montgomery testified.
Trial evidence suggests Kosowski had already been planning the murder before that incident.
Cozzi became an “obsession” for Kosowski, Assistant State Attorney Nathan Vonderheide said during closing arguments.
Kosowski was researching Cozzi online and drove to his personal home in January, the evidence showed.
Before Cozzi disappeared, Kosowski also surveilled the law firm’s office several times, trial evidence suggests.
One employee called the police after finding a man believed to be Kosowski in an electrical closet wearing a surgical mask and hat.
The man claimed he was addressing a building power outage and apologized for startling her, the woman testified at trial. Kosowski’s fingerprint was later recovered from the utility closet, according to trial evidence.
Defendant litigates for his life
Kosowski occasionally questioned trial witnesses on cross-examination during the bench trial and complained about poor access to the state’s evidence in jail, but he declined to give an opening statement.
At one point, the surgeon asked a prosecutor to climb into a trash bag to demonstrate whether it could fit an adult-sized body. Kosowski similarly asked a medical examiner during their testimony to climb into a cart—like the one thought to have carried Cozzi’s body—for a prosecutor to drag across the courtroom and attempt to lift.
The judge quashed those requests, though Kosowski said it would show it’s not possible for an average person to do that alone.
After issuing the verdict, Bulone asked Kosowski again if he wished to continue without attorneys in the penalty phase of the trial. Kosowski turned down a lawyer and said he declines to present any mitigating evidence to encourage the judge not to order him to death.
In August, after moving to represent himself, Kosowski withdrew his former attorneys’ motions fighting the death penalty. He refused to comply with a psychological evaluation or allow his former counsel to compile mitigating materials typically used in the penalty phase of a death penalty trial.
A special prosecutor, mandated by the court, will present some mitigation on Kosowski’s behalf at an October hearing before the judge issues a sentence. The court-appointed attorney said he will pursue possible witnesses like the surgeon’s mother, who might testify to save Kosowski’s life.
Kosowski, however, has repeatedly said he won’t give any statement on his own.
Source: CNN, Lauren del Valle, September 23, 2026
"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
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