Abraham Jacob Bonowitz: Pittsburgh synagogue shooter should not be executed

Recently, the shooter in the 2018 hate-fueled antisemitic Pittsburgh synagogue attack was convicted. Now there will be a trial to decide if we eventually make him world famous again by executing him many years from now, or instead simply forget his name and throw away the key.

Six days earlier, the killer known as the Unabomber died unceremoniously in a federal prison. It was a blip in the news. The Unabomber killed three people and maimed 23 in a yearslong series of package bombs. He faced execution at trial but received a sentence of life imprisonment without parole, which might be better termed “death by incarceration.”

If the Unabomber had been executed, it would have been a circus, much like the way Timothy McVeigh was executed. That was the first federal execution under current laws. The whole world was watching because of that, and the nature of that infamous crime. McVeigh’s execution was followed shortly by two other federal executions. Can anyone name either prisoner or his victims?

How many of us can name even one of the victims of the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre? Or the Charleston, S.C., church shooting? Or the Murrah bombing? Or the Parkland school shooting? This is important because, when the government executes a prisoner, it is using our tax dollars to conduct a largely ceremonial killing in all of our names.

McVeigh was executed in 2001, and by then more than half of the members of the Murrah bombing victims family association opposed that execution. Some because they had come to forgiveness, and others because they wanted McVeigh to suffer more by having to live out his days in solitary confinement.

The Pittsburgh synagogue shooter’s jury now will consider whether he should get death by execution or death by incarceration. It’s a roll of the dice. The most recent terrorist tried by the federal government was a Muslim man who drove a truck down a bike path in New York. That case ended just a few months ago when the jury settled on death by incarceration rather than execution.

One question the Pittsburgh jury will consider is whether the killer is sufficiently culpable. There are very serious mental illness issues that we’ll be hearing about, and, because all of the victims are Jewish and Judaism itself was attacked, we must also look at it from a Jewish perspective.

According to Jewish law, there are more than 200 preconditions which must be in place for a death sentence to be allowed. Mental illness precludes execution, and so too does this: This racist terrorist had to have been warned prior to the crime by two people not related to him or the victims or each other that, if he did the crime, he might get the death penalty.

The Torah very clearly calls for the death penalty, but Jews do not go by a literal interpretation of the scriptures. For more than 2,000 years, Jewish law has boiled down to“the death penalty exists, but it is not for man to use it.” The Torah has never been read exclusively literally.

I used to support the death penalty. In trying to prove it works, I realized that capital punishment is a monumental public policy failure. My issue is fairness. Carved into the face of the U.S. Supreme Court building are four words expressing the bedrock foundation of our legal system: “Equal Justice Under Law.” No one can seriously argue that the U.S. legal system meets that ideal of fairness.

We can be safe from people who have done terrible things, and hold them accountable with severe punishment, without executions. That’s what we do in the vast majority of cases, and that is what we should do with the Pittsburgh synagogue shooter. Throw away the key.

Abraham Jacob Bonowitz is co-founder of L’Chaim: Jews Against the Death Penalty and executive director of DeathPenaltyAction.org.