{"id":74565,"date":"2025-12-31T10:16:14","date_gmt":"2025-12-31T10:16:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/74565\/"},"modified":"2025-12-31T10:16:14","modified_gmt":"2025-12-31T10:16:14","slug":"lawyers-for-pittsburgh-synagogue-shooter-ask-court-to-reconsider-his-death-sentence-jns","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/74565\/","title":{"rendered":"Lawyers for Pittsburgh synagogue shooter ask court to reconsider his death sentence | JNS"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\u2019Simcha 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<\/a> on Sunday.<\/p>\n

The lawyers claimed earlier this month that they weren\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cU.S. district judge Robert J. Colville, who presided over the Bowers trial, dismissed Bower\u2019s initial appeal in early 2024. It\u2019s taken nearly two years for shooter\u2019s attorneys, a team of federal public defenders, to finalize their appeal to the Third Circuit,\u201d the Post-Gazette reported. \u201cEven then, records show, attorneys argued they\u2019d not been given sufficient time to go through five years of pretrial motions and three months of trial testimony.\u201d<\/p>\n

Per the paper, lawyers said that the prosecution \u201cimproperly excluded potential jurors who were black, Hispanic and Jewish\u201d and that the prosecution \u201cimproperly struck, or excluded, jurors who said they were opposed to the death penalty but could follow the law\u2014that is, that they could impose the death penalty if they believed prosecutors had sufficiently argued for it.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2014that marshals said he had \u201cmade efforts in recent days to close the distance between himself and the armed deputy\u201d and that \u201cButler County prison officers have reported that Bowers told them he knows who is armed and he feels confident he could disarm them,\u201d according to the paper<\/p>\n

The post Lawyers for Pittsburgh synagogue shooter ask court to reconsider his death sentence<\/a> appeared first on JNS.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Attorneys for Robert Bowers, who was sentenced to death on Aug. 3, 2023 for shooting and killing 11…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":74566,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[2891,31,2892,2894,26492,16639,16637,16644,740,742,16640,73,75,74,6306,1401,2890,44],"class_list":["post-74565","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-pittsburgh","tag-common-law","tag-crime","tag-criminal-justice","tag-criminal-law","tag-criminal-procedure","tag-government-institutions","tag-judiciaries","tag-jury","tag-justice","tag-law","tag-legal-procedure","tag-pittsburgh","tag-pittsburgh-headlines","tag-pittsburgh-news","tag-pittsburgh-synagogue-shooting","tag-prosecutor","tag-public-law","tag-u-s-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74565","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=74565"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74565\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/74566"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=74565"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=74565"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=74565"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}