“All of that evidence carries over,” Rivetti said. Rivetti said the government had already met the thresholds to prove that the defendant’s crimes were eligible for the death penalty earlier in the trial. attorney who opened the federal government’s arguments on Monday, said he expected the gunman’s lawyers to mount a mental health defense and that the government was ready to rebut it. Throughout opening arguments and Monday’s testimony, the defendant, clad in a gray sweater and a collared shirt, looked away from the witness stand, as he has for most of the trial thus far. He added, “Active psychosis makes it impossible to assess stimuli and read the world appropriately.” The defense plans to outline the gunman’s history “of psychiatric institutionalization and multiple suicide attempts,” Burt said. Those delusional beliefs led directly to the horrible events of Oct. “The impediments caused him to form delusional and paranoid beliefs. Bowers’ brain is impaired in many respects,” Burt said. He showed slides representing the anatomy of a human brain to demonstrate how experts will identify abnormalities in the gunman’s frontal and temporal lobes. He just could not keep quiet.” She wept for a moment.īurt said the defense was ready to bring an array of medical experts to testify that his client’s brain was structurally incapable of dealing with the real world. “He was always very excited to meet them and talk their ear off and continue talking as they walked away. “He was much more comfortable with friends and family but he always welcomed strangers,” she said. Children of elderly parents and the sister of two men with mental disabilities grew emotional as they described the delicate and sometimes tense relationship caregivers have with vulnerable family members.Įchoing the Torah reading about welcoming guests that was scheduled for the day the gunman attacked the synagogue, Diane Rosenthal said her brother Cecil loved to talk endlessly to anyone he met. They elicited testimony from the families of eight victims who were elderly or infirm. The prosecution has the opposite goal: setting out to prove aggravating factors that would incline the jury toward the death penalty. “How did a man … with no criminal history, all of a sudden decide to pick up his weapons and shoot 11 victims.” “What we are going to present in this phase of the case is to shine a greater light on how his distorted thinking came about,” said Michael Burt, one of the defendant’s lawyers, as the sentencing phase of the trial opened on Monday.
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