Jurors Begins Deliberations in First Phase of Pittsburgh Synagogue Trial

After three weeks of wrenching testimony, the prosecution and the defense delivered closing arguments on Thursday in the first phase of the federal trial of the man charged with carrying out the deadliest antisemitic attack in the country’s history.

Robert Bowers, 50, the man charged in the October 2018 killing of 11 worshipers at a Pittsburgh synagogue, faces the possibility of a death sentence if convicted.

The phase of the trial that concluded on Thursday in federal court here was to determine whether Mr. Bowers was guilty, and the outcome of this stage of the proceedings has not been in significant doubt. The defense conceded in both its opening statement and closing argument that “there is no dispute” that Mr. Bowers planned and carried out the massacre, though his lawyers did argue that the motivation for his actions may not satisfy the elements of some of the 63 federal charges.

The question at the heart of the case has long been whether Mr. Bowers, whose charges include 11 counts of killing people because of their religion, would be sentenced to death. If the jury finds him guilty, the penalty he should face will be argued before the jury over the next several weeks.

On Thursday, the prosecutors went first, painting a harrowing portrait of the horror that unfolded on the morning of Oct. 27, 2018 at the Tree of Life synagogue, where three congregations — Tree of Life, New Light and Dor Hadash — were gathering for services.

Mary J. Hahn, a prosecutor with the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, recounted the rampage, from the arrival of the regular worshipers to the moment, less than an hour and a half later, when Mr. Bowers crawled out of a bullet-riddled classroom after a shootout with police officers. By that time, 11 people had been killed and six wounded, a massacre that Ms. Hahn described in excruciating detail, her narrative accompanied by recordings of terrified 911 calls and graphic crime-scene photos.

“The defendant turned a sacred house of worship into a hunting ground,” Ms. Hahn said.

To support the government’s contention that Mr. Bowers had acted out of a “cold and calculating” hatred, the prosecutor described a flood of virulently antisemitic posts that he wrote and shared on Gab.com, a social media site, in which he celebrated the Holocaust and called for genocide.

“The defendant is dedicated to the eradication of Jews,” Ms. Hahn said. “That is what propelled him to act.”

In a closing argument that was far shorter than the government’s, Elisa Long, a federal public defender, began by acknowledging “the devastation, the loss and the unbearable grief” caused by Mr. Bowers, and emphasized there was “no excuse, no justification.”

His social media posts clearly reflected hatred for Jews, she said. But she pointed out that in many of the posts before the attack, Mr. Bowers had become “almost singularly focused” on HIAS, a Jewish agency that helps resettle refugees in the United States, which Mr. Bowers believed was leading to the “genocide” of white people.

Mr. Bowers indicated on social media that he had chosen the synagogue because Dor Hadash, which had participated in HIAS events, worshiped there. “In his mind he needed to kill Jews who supported HIAS because they were bringing in immigrants who were committing genocide against children,” Ms. Long said. “None of this makes any sense, none of this is true, but it is what Mr. Bowers believed to be real and true.”

Some of the federal offenses Mr. Bowers is charged with — that he had acted with a conscious intent to obstruct the exercise of religious worship — would not, Ms. Long said, apply if he was primarily acting out of an “irrational” belief that he needed to stop refugees.

To look so closely at the particulars of the law in this way, she granted, was “not terribly satisfying” given the scale of loss that he had caused. But, she said, Mr. Bowers needed “to be held accountable for the crimes he did commit, but not be held for the crimes he did not commit.”

In the prosecution’s rebuttal, Eric G. Olshan, who was sworn in as the new U.S. attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania this week, was blunt: “The defendant hated Jews,” he said. “He had many reasons but it all boiled down to one thing: He hated Jews.

The jury went into deliberations a little before 2:30 p.m., as carts full of evidence were wheeled into the back of the courtroom. If Mr. Bowers is found guilty, the jury will then have to decide first whether he is eligible to be sentenced to death for the crimes he is convicted of. If the jurors determine he is eligible, they will then weigh whether a death sentence is warranted. The testimony and arguments about these issues are expected to last for about six weeks.