What to Know as the Tree of Life Massacre Trial Begins
On the morning of Oct. 27, 2018, a gunman walked into the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh and killed 11 people who had gathered to worship, the deadliest antisemitic attack in the nation’s history. On Monday, more than four years later, the trial of the man accused of the massacre will begin with jury selection.
The trial will take place in two phases, the first concerning guilt and the second on the penalty. As the facts surrounding the shooting are mostly undisputed, it will effectively be a monthslong tribunal about whether the defendant, Robert Bowers, 50, should be executed. His lawyers have offered to resolve the case with a guilty plea on all counts in exchange for life in prison without the possibility of release, but federal prosecutors have rejected these offers.
Trials for mass shooters are relatively rare, given that these massacres often end with the death of the attacker. The man who killed 12 people in a Colorado movie theater in 2012 was sentenced to life in prison after a 10-week trial; the white supremacist who killed nine Black churchgoers in Charleston, S.C., in 2015, was convicted and sentenced to death. The former student who killed 17 people at a high school in Parkland, Fla., pleaded guilty but faced a sentencing trial last year, where a jury voted to keep him in prison for life.
Here’s what to know as the Tree of Life trial begins:
Who were the victims?
At the time of the attack, the Tree of Life*Or L’Simcha synagogue, which sits in a friendly neighborhood with a rich Jewish history, was home to three separate congregations, all of which were gathering for services in different parts of the building. The Tree of Life congregation, founded in Pittsburgh more than 150 years ago, and the smaller New Light congregation are both conservative; the third congregation, Dor Hadash, is Reconstructionist, a progressive movement within Judaism.
Source: The New York Times
