On August 2, a federal jury issued a death sentence in its verdict on Robert Bowers, the white supremacist whose massacre of 11 Jews at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in October 2018 is the worst act of antisemitic violence in American history.
The defence claimed that Bowers was schizophrenic. He had, the New York Times reports, been “committed to psychiatric hospitals multiple times and tried to kill himself more than once”.
Eric Olshan, the US attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania, argued that Bowers was sane, and that his mind, like that of millions of others, was “filled with hate and common, extreme, white supremacist, antisemitic tropes”.
“Jews are the children of Satan,” Bowers wrote on Gab, a social media site. Was this demented incitement, or was Bowers merely misremembering Revelation 3:9, which asserts that the Jews are “the synagogue of Satan”?
Or was he thinking of Billy Graham, the evangelist who used that phrase when he privately told President Nixon in 1973 that the Jews had a “stranglehold” on the media?
The jury concluded that paranoid ideation about Jews is, legally speaking, sane. Fortunately, the Jewish tradition is against imposing the death penalty. I know this because the BBC website says so.
There are 36 capital crimes in what the BBC, so punctilious about the pronouns, charmingly persists in calling “the Old Testament”. But the Talmud creates a “forest of barriers”, so there “are very few examples of people being executed by Jewish law in rabbinic times”.
Israel abolished capital punishment except for Nazi war criminals in 1954. Only one person, Adolf Eichmann, was executed, and he, let’s face it, Got What He Deserved.
pittsburgh shooter Robert Bowers
Robert Bowers (Photo: Butler County Prison)
Despite Jewish tradition and the BBC, the Tree of Life’s rabbi, Jeffrey Myers, believes that Robert Bowers has also Got What He Deserves. The families of Bowers’s victims praised his sentence as fair. This confirms that many of the people who oppose death penalty would gladly pull the switch on someone who killed or hurt a loved one.
Rabbi Myers, whose knowledge of the divine plan exceeds even his knowledge of the Talmud and the BBC’s knowledge of absolutely everything, found it significant that the jury returned its verdict on Tu B’Av, the minor festival known as the Holiday of Love.
“Today, we are embraced by love — and not only in the judicial system,” said Rabbi Myers, rather weirdly. “Today, we received an immense embrace from the halls of justice.”
Love is blind like justice, but love is also highly partial. Rabbi Myers seems to think the law should be too. The justice system, he said, has “supported, nurtured and upheld” the Jews, and “made the point very clear” that Jews “have the right to practise Judaism”.
This right has not been in doubt since 1790, when President George Washington told the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, Rhode Island that they could continue to congregate and “enjoy the goodwill of the other inhabitants who dwell in this land”.
What is in doubt is whether the justice system, while abounding in goodwill towards the Jews, can guarantee that they can live in safety when so many of America's other inhabitants have sanely lost the plot.
“I don’t believe in coincidences,” Myers said of the verdict. “It was meant to be today.”
This raises the question of whether Bowers’s rampage was also fated. If Rabbi Myers really believes there are no coincidences, he should have mentioned it in Bowers’s trial. Nothing says “diminished responsibility” like divine intervention, and nothing says “schizophrenia” like “God told me to do it.”
Robert Bowers will become the 42nd person waiting on the federal death row in Terre Haute, Indiana. He will wait for years. The Trump administration’s execution of 13 prisoners in 2020 and 2021 were the first federal executions in nearly two decades. In July 2021, Merrick Garland, President Joe Biden’s attorney general, issued a memo ordering a moratorium and a review.
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The Tree of Life synagogue after the killings (Photo: Getty Images)
The Justice Department, Garland wrote, was especially concerned about “arbitrariness” in the application of the death penalty, and about its “disparate impact on people of colour”.
Joe Biden campaigned against the death penalty. Merrick Garland is against it. His review is, appropriately enough, a dead letter. Nevertheless, Biden’s Justice Department defends the convictions and sentences on the prisoners already on Death Row — and has brought new capital prosecutions.
Biden’s Justice Department has twice pursued a death sentence, one of them against a person of colour. In March, it failed to secure the maximum penalty against Saifullo Saipov, the Uzbekistan-born Islamist who in 2017 killed eight by ramming a truck onto a Manhattan bike path.
When Bowers’s lawyers offered a guilty plea in return for life in prison, the Justice Department rejected it. His conviction is the administration’s first successful capital prosecution. Not that it intends to execute the verdict. The federal government isn’t frying tonight, or indeed on any other night.
“Justice has been served,” the American Jewish Committee said in a statement. But justice is not going to be served anytime soon, if at all.
The Justice Department pursued a sentence it has no intention of carrying out. The families of the victims approve the sentence but are not going to see it enacted. Robert Bowers both Got What He Deserves and will not get it. As usual in today’s America, the form counts for more than the content, and the gulf between the two suggests ethical confusion, bureaucratic hypocrisy, electoral pandering and a general feeling that the arc of justice is being bent towards partisan goals.
As Rabbi Myers intuited, the sentence is primarily a form of public messaging. After all, the evidently sane gunmen of the future are hardly going to be rationally dissuaded from mass-murdering Jews by the threat of a death penalty that no one wants to carry out.
So we must conclude that the beneficiaries of this judicial theatre are the Jews of America. We are supposed to find that comforting. The problem with the “immense embrace” of a politicised judicial system is that, once you’re in it, you’ve no idea where and how tightly it might squeeze you next.
