The perpetrator of a 2018 attack on a Pittsburgh synagogue, the deadliest attack against Jews in US history, for which he faces the death penalty, was found guilty of murder on Friday, American media reported.
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Robert Bowers, a 50-year-old white trucker, was accused of 11 murders in 2018 at the Tree of Life Synagogue in this eastern US city, compounded by its classification as an anti-Semitic act.
According to CNN and ABC Television, as well as the New York Times, this exceptional trial will now enter a second phase to decide whether the perpetrator should be sentenced to death or life imprisonment by Pennsylvania federal court.
According to the court press present in Pittsburgh, the jury deliberated for about five hours to arrive at that first verdict.
Mr Bowers was prosecuted on 63 counts.
Beyond the admission of guilt, this two-part trial addresses the death penalty that could be imposed by the US federal judiciary.
During the investigative phase, Robert Bowers’ lawyers had unsuccessfully offered to plead “guilty” in exchange for a guarantee that their client would not be sentenced to death.
The US Department of Justice refused.
On October 27, 2018, Bowers broke into Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue armed with three pistols and a semi-automatic assault rifle.
Crying “All Jews Must Die,” he opened fire, killing 11 people, including a 97-year-old worshiper, during Shabbat ceremonies in a historic Pittsburgh Jewish neighborhood in the bloodiest attack on Jews in the United States.
He had previously posted racist, anti-Semitic and xenophobic messages on a far-right social network.
Then-Republican President Donald Trump had requested the death penalty, a request followed by the then Justice Department and granted after Democratic President Joe Biden took office on Jan. 20, 2021.
But while candidate Biden promised in 2020 to abolish the death penalty nationally, this process has reignited debates about this highest penalty, which is still practiced in many American states.
In 2019, the Pittsburgh attorney general warned that he would seek the death penalty for Robert Bowers, citing his “lack of remorse” and “hatred and contempt” for Jews.
During the trial, which began at the end of May, his lawyer Judy Clarke recognized immediately that his client was in fact the man who shot the Jews. “There’s no point in looking for meaning in a senseless act,” she had defended, trying to save Bowers’ life rather than protesting his innocence.
That trial comes amid an increase in racist and anti-Semitic acts in the United States, which has reached its highest level in 30 years, according to federal police and FBI statistics cited by the Washington agency in April.
According to the Anti-Semitism organization Anti Defamation League, the country witnessed a record 2,717 acts of anti-Semitism (assaults, verbal abuse, vandalism, etc.) in 2021, an increase of 34% over the year.
According to the Washington Post, in 2022 this association counted 3,697 acts of anti-Semitism (+36% over a year), which was unprecedented since 1979.