The shooter who gunned down 11 people at a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018 in an antisemitic rage was found guilty of 63 federal charges on Friday. Robert Bowers had previously pleaded not guilty to all of his charges, which include hate crimes resulting in death, for the Tree of Life massacre. In the opening statements of the trial, his attorneys admitted he murdered the worshippers but argued it wasn’t a hate crime—although antisemitic posts Bowers made on Gab.com celebrating the Holocaust and hailing the Nazis helped prove otherwise. The Justice Department has made it clear that it was seeking the death penalty for Bowers for targeting “men and women participating in Jewish religious worship.” His legal team tried to offer the DOJ a guilty plea in exchange for taking the death penalty out of the question, but it was rejected. The trial will now move on to decide whether Bowers’ crimes should be punishable by death.
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