PITTSBURGH (AP) – Attorneys for the gunman who killed 11 people at a Pittsburgh synagogue asked for a court order Tuesday to exhume the body of his long-dead father.
Attorneys for Robert Bowers want the body released for DNA testing after federal prosecutors raised questions about paternity during Bowers’ sentencing hearing for the 2018 Tree of Life synagogue killings.
Bowers, a 50-year-old truck driver from Baldwin County, was convicted in June of 63 felony charges in the nation’s deadliest shooting. A federal jury must decide whether to sentence him to death or life in prison without parole.
The defense, trying to prove that Bowers has a family history of mental illness, has introduced evidence that his father, Randall Bowers, was diagnosed with schizophrenia. The defense attorney says Robert Bowers also has schizophrenia and opened fire on the synagogue because of the delusional belief that Jews were helping to commit the massacre of white people.
Randall Bowers died by suicide in 1979 on the night of his rape trial. At a hearing last week, prosecutors sought to question whether he is Robert Bowers’ biological father. The defense asked a judge Tuesday to clarify the issue by ordering the exhumation of Randall Bowers’ body.
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“The Department of Justice shares the defense’s concern about seeking the death of a mentally ill person. “If the government contends strongly, even on the weak evidence, that Randall Bowers is the biological father of Robert Bowers it shows that it also believes that the father is important and important,” the defense attorneys wrote.
The government was expected to oppose the defense motion.
The defense, seeking to persuade a federal judge to spare Bowers’ life, was trying to show that Bowers had a traumatic childhood characterized by abuse and neglect, and that he had threatened or tried to kill himself several times as a teenager, including by setting himself on fire. Prosecutors said Bowers was motivated by his hatred of Jews and spent six months planning the attack on the synagogue.
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