Attorneys for Robert Bowers, who was sentenced to death on Aug. 3, 2023 for shooting and killing 11 worshippers at Tree of Life*Or L’Simcha in Pittsburgh on Oct. 27, 2018, are asking the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit to resentence their client, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported on Sunday.
The lawyers claimed earlier this month that they weren’t given enough time to make the case that they disagreed with potential jurors that the prosecution excluded and included and that their client should not have been shackled in the courtroom, which they say prejudiced the jury.
“U.S. district judge Robert J. Colville, who presided over the Bowers trial, dismissed Bower’s initial appeal in early 2024. It’s taken nearly two years for shooter’s attorneys, a team of federal public defenders, to finalize their appeal to the Third Circuit,” the Post-Gazette reported. “Even then, records show, attorneys argued they’d not been given sufficient time to go through five years of pretrial motions and three months of trial testimony.”
Per the paper, lawyers said that the prosecution “improperly excluded potential jurors who were black, Hispanic and Jewish” and that the prosecution “improperly struck, or excluded, jurors who said they were opposed to the death penalty but could follow the law—that is, that they could impose the death penalty if they believed prosecutors had sufficiently argued for it.”
The judge opted to have Bowers shackled due to concerns from U.S. marshals. The lawyers said that it took months after the trial for them to be told the reason that he was shackled—that marshals said he had “made efforts in recent days to close the distance between himself and the armed deputy” and that “Butler County prison officers have reported that Bowers told them he knows who is armed and he feels confident he could disarm them,” according to the paper.
The Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh said that it will “forever stand with the families and survivors of the Tree of Life building attack.”
“The jury verdict and sentencing reflected the gravity of this horrific crime, and we believe justice was served,” it said. “We have full confidence in the prosecution team and the judicial system as this process moves forward.”
