PITTSBURGH – A federal jury sentenced to death Wednesday a trucker convicted of killing 11 people and wounding seven others at a synagogue nearly five years ago in the most egregious anti-Semitic attack in US history.
Jurors had to reach a unanimous decision to impose the death penalty or else the gunman, Robert Gregory Bowers, would have received life in prison without the possibility of parole.
The jury will now deliver its verdict to US District Court Judge Robert Colville, who is required to impose the death penalty on the gunman.
Despite the sentence, it could be years before the gunman is executed, given the Justice Department’s moratorium on capital punishment.
Executions are relatively rare in the federal system. they have only taken out 50 from 1927, the last one on January 16, 2021, when the triple murderer Dustin John Higgs died by lethal injection in the US Penitentiary, Terre Hautea maximum security federal prison in Indiana.
This same jury convicted the shooter last month of 63 criminal counts stemming from the October 27, 2018 attack in the neighborhood of Squirrel Hill in Pittsburgh.
This article was originally published in English by Carolina Gonzalez and david k li for our sister network NBCNews.com. For more from NBC News enter here.
