Judy Clarke, lawyer representing Robert Bowers, has history of preventing suspects from receiving death penalty
PITTSBURGH (KDKA) — Jury selection is set to begin this month in the trial of Robert Bowers.
For four years, the families of the victims of the Tree of Life shooting have waited for justice, though they are divided on whether the gunman should face the death penalty.
Bowers' lawyer, Judy Clarke, does not talk to reporters, but it's clear she has one singular drive: to prevent high-profile murder suspects from receiving the death penalty. She has obtained plea bargains for Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, Eric Rudolph, Atlanta Olympics Bomber, and Tucson mass shooter Jared Lee Loughner.
She convinced a jury not to impose the death penalty on Susan Smith, the woman who drowned her two children in a lake in South Carolina in 1994. Now, she'll try to do the same in Pittsburgh for Bowers.
"This is not a case in which there will be any contest about what happened, but the question is what should happen to the defendant," St. Vincent College law professor Bruce Antkowiak said.
Even though there's little question of the synagogue gunman's guilt, Antkowiak says over the next few months, federal prosecutors will present in horrific and excruciating detail the cold-blooded killing of 11 innocent worshippers, building a case that the gunman should pay the ultimate price for pre-meditated murder on a mass scale.
"The notion that this was a very well-calculated effort," Antkowiak said. "This was not a spur-of-the-moment matter by the defendant. This was planned, this was carried out."
But as is her practice, Clarke will mostly allow that testimony and evidence without objection. According to Antkowiak, it's only in the penalty phase of the trial that she will ask the jury to spare the gunman's life by trying to humanize him.
"We are not here to tell you that the act was not inhumane and that the defendant's conduct was not inhumane," Antkowiak said. "But we are going to show you that this defendant is a human being and we're going to try to humanize them as much as possible."
But in her last high-profile trial, Clarke's strategy failed. A jury convicted Dzhokhar Tsarnaev of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing and voted for the death penalty despite Clarke's defense that he was only a troubled teenager who was under the spell of his older brother who planned the assault.
Humanizing Bowers would appear to be an even more daunting task.
Over the past four years, the government has accused Clarke of needlessly delaying the trial with a constant flurry of motions and evidentiary requests. Some believe she's taken that time to meet with the gunman in the Butler County Prison to delve into his background. And a recent court filing gives a clue as to what that defense will look like. It maintains that the gunman "suffers from schizophrenia, epilepsy, and structural and functional impairments of his brain."
This week, Clarke asked the court and the Justice Department to void the death penalty. But even though Governor Josh Shapiro has extended a moratorium on executions in the state, this does not apply to federal cases.