In mass shooting cases, stakes and emotions are high for prosecution and defense

William Difenderfer still remembers the day. It was a Friday. April 28, 2000.

A Mt. Lebanon man went on a killing spree, fatally shooting five people from Western Pennsylvania because of their race and religion.

Difenderfer, a well-known criminal defense attorney, lived in Mt. Lebanon. His children attended schools there. He remembers they were locked down that afternoon as police searched for the killer.

When Difenderfer headed to Tambellini’s on Route 51 for dinner that night with out-of-town friends, he guessed that he had a 25% chance of getting the alleged shooter as a client. By that point in his career, Difenderfer had represented a man accused of killing a 14-month-old with a stray bullet and a teen accused of killing a Pittsburgh police officer. Difenderfer’s performance in those cases — both clients were found not guilty of murder but convicted of a lesser manslaughter charge — and the confidence with which he carried himself made him a natural fit.

When he got home about 11 p.m., there was a message on his answering machine.

The caller ID said Baumhammers.

Edward Borkowski has three framed pictures from the Richard Baumhammers trial on the wall in his chambers.

In one, family members comfort the victims’ children. In another, Baumhammers, wearing a bulletproof vest, is being led away after his arrest. In the third, a window of the Beth El Congregation synagogue is pierced by a bullet, vandalized by Baumhammers after he killed one of its members.

Borkowski, then-head of the Allegheny County District Attorney’s Office homicide unit, visited those sites in the immediate aftermath of the shootings. He has had the pictures on his wall for as long as he can remember.

“It’s a reminder to me,” Borkowski said, “of not only the career I’ve had as a prosecutor — and the pressure that attaches — but it also reminds me of the human aspect of every crime.”

Massacres drench courtrooms in violence, wrenching grief and numbing technical detail. For prosecutors and defense attorneys, working cases like the one scheduled to start Monday for the mass shooting at a Squirrel Hill synagogue is challenging and daunting. It is the result of hard work and dedication to the law. It is often the pinnacle of their legal career.

But those same high-stakes cases also carry mental and emotional burdens.

Prosecutors strive to achieve justice — for individual victims and their families but also for the greater community and even the judicial system.

Defense attorneys face different but no less intense pressures. They must represent a person charged with perpetrating the most heinous acts a human can inflict. They often are the only thing standing between their client and death row.

Lawyers on both sides will face those same challenges as all eyes turn to the federal courthouse in Pittsburgh for the scheduled start of jury selection in the case against Robert Bowers.

He is accused of killing 11 worshippers at the Tree of Life synagogue Oct. 27, 2018, in the worst antisemitic attack in U.S. history.

The pressure will be immense.

“Death is different,” Borkowski said.

Aurora, Colo.

George Brauchler was a deputy district attorney in Colorado when two teenage students entered Columbine High School on April 20, 1999, and shot and killed 12 classmates and a teacher.

Although the attackers killed themselves, the state filed felony counts against the men who sold the guns to the teen shooters. Brauchler prosecuted those charges.

He thought that prosecution would be the case in his career that would receive the most media attention.

But 13 years later, on July 20, 2012, a gunman entered a movie theater showing a midnight screening of “Batman: The Dark Knight Rises” in Aurora, Colo. The gunman killed 12 people and wounded 70 more.

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Related:

• More on the trial of Robert Bowers
• Robert Bowers trial: What you need to know about Tree of Life synagogue shooting case
• Majority of victims' families in Tree of Life shooting case want death penalty
• Defense attorneys in synagogue mass shooting again ask to have death penalty option thrown out

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Brauchler was elected district attorney a few months later. In his new role, he had the responsibility of deciding whether his office should pursue capital punishment or accept an offer from the defendant, who had been diagnosed with schizotypal personality disorder, to plead guilty and serve life in prison.

Many of the victims and their families wanted to avoid a trial, Brauchler said, while others did not.

“There wasn’t unanimity at all,” he said.

It was a difficult decision, one he didn’t take lightly.

“I’m a Catholic. I talked to our priest about it,” Brauchler said. “It’s easy to talk about it on the campaign trail. It should never be easy to put pen to paper on (opting for execution).”

Brauchler decided to seek death. He felt morally obligated to be the prosecutor on the case.

“I wanted to be the guy to own it,” he said.

As the elected district attorney, Brauchler said, “You’re always cognizant of the pressure from the community. People recognize you at the grocery store.”

Another pressure Brauchler experienced, he said, was in representing his office and colleagues well.

“You don’t want to embarrass your office. It was the biggest case in America at the time,” he said. He wondered: “ ‘Are we doing the right thing. Are we going to get the right result?’ ”

Brauchler remembers the feeling as he was about to start opening statements — knowing there were satellite trucks outside the courthouse and reporters covering the case from around the world.

He thought to himself, “ ‘If I screw this up, it’s not just in the courtroom.’

“You could hear a pin drop.”

But then, he said, as in every trial, he became hyperfocused. His opening took 90 minutes and included 827 PowerPoint slides, Brauchler said.

Opening statements in the Aurora case began in April 2015, and the trial ended about four months later, in August. There were 306 witnesses and more than 2,000 exhibits entered into evidence.

There was so much painful, emotional testimony, Brauchler said, that the prosecution team had to rearrange witnesses to take some of the toll off the jurors.

The jury convicted the defendant on all counts, but during the penalty phase, one juror refused to consider a death sentence.

The jury imposed life in prison.

Brauchler wondered how the families would feel, having endured months of testimony and gruesome details from that fateful night.

In the end, he said, it was the right decision.

“Several family members approached me after and said, ‘We get it now. We would not have known the details of the last moments of our son’s life if we hadn’t gone through this,’ ” Brauchler said. “ ‘There’s a little more closure now because we went to trial.’ ”

‘How can you sleep at night?’

Experts say that both sides in a capital case have to be careful to avoid public opinion and getting drawn into the emotional pain and turmoil that comes from a mass killing.

“Prosecutors may feel the weight of the world on their shoulders because the whole community is saying ‘Get that guy!’ And the families of the victims are putting all their hopes on this person,” said Ronald Sullivan, a criminal law professor at Harvard University.

It can be difficult, he said. But they must remember they represent the government, not the victims’ families.

David A. Harris, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh, said a prosecutor’s job is to advocate for the state, to serve as a minister of justice.

The defense, on the other hand, has only one obligation: to represent the accused.

“They don’t have a duty to the system,” Harris said.

Instead, the defense must ensure that, if the government gets a guilty verdict, it happens the right way, he said. “Your job is to stand in front of the prosecutorial apparatus,” Harris said.

Defense lawyers have to be comfortable knowing that sometimes their client is guilty. When that’s the case, the focus turns to protecting their constitutional rights.

When faced with representing a loathsome client, Sullivan said, the defense must evaluate their decision to take the case honestly and “provide zealous representation notwithstanding their personal feelings.”

“Without that,” Sullivan said, “we run the risk of government trampling the rights of everyday citizens and convicting innocent people.”

But Harris said death penalty litigation is different. In addition to the pressures of being responsible for trying to save someone’s life, he said, it can be a heavy emotional burden.

“Not everybody can (prosecute such a case),” Harris said. “Not everybody should.”

Sullivan said defense attorneys feel the weight of the crime just like the public. He defended former New England Patriots tight end Aaron Hernandez in Hernandez’s 2017 homicide trial. Hernandez was found not guilty of killing two men — he previously had been convicted of killing another man in 2013 and was serving a life prison term.

“Lawyers are human beings,” he said. “Lawyers are members of the community, so of course they’re impacted by particularly horrific crime.”

As a public defender, Harris said he often heard from victims and their loved ones: “How can you sleep at night? I hope this happens to your kid.”

It’s common for the public to conflate an attorney’s job with an attorney’s views.

“A lot of people don’t do this work for that reason,” Harris said.

Wilkinsburg

Randall McKinney was court-­appointed to represent one of two men accused of killing five people and an unborn child March 9, 2016, in Wilkinsburg.

Immediately after winning a not-guilty verdict, McKinney remembers the mother of three of the victims shouting at him in the courthouse hallway.

“He needs to look at this face because when I’m dead, McKinney’s the blame of it,” Jessica Shelton shouted.

“That absolutely affected me,” McKinney said. “I’m still affected by her anger and her feelings that I was responsible for some unjust outcome.”

He said he’s confident he did his job the right way.

Already established as a skilled defense attorney, McKinney said his strategy at trial was aggressive.

“You have to fight fire with fire,” he said.

He recognized going in that a zealous representation of his client — including attacking the police work and prosecutorial decisions that led to the charges — could damage his professional relationships with the district attorneys and detectives involved.

“I determined I couldn’t concern myself with any kind of long-term professional consequences because something much more important was at stake,” he said.

The pressures of a death-penalty case, McKinney said, made him focus even more, knowing the grave consequences if he missed something or forgot a certain line of questioning. He had an intense fear of failure.

“That was motivation to put in a little more work, to make sure I didn’t have that on my conscience — to make sure I had no regrets,” he said.

That obligation becomes even more intense when you develop a relationship with the client, he said.

“The two of you develop an us-versus-the-world mentality, and you become incredibly close,” McKinney said. “At some point, he felt more like a brother and less like a client. We fought like brothers. We laughed like brothers.

“I became incredibly protective of him because he felt like family.”

Taking on clients facing death, he said, is an “awesome responsibility” that requires the defense attorney to have resources — friends, family and other attorneys — for support.

“It is very lonely to be the one person standing up for someone who everyone else in the world hates,” he said. “It does weigh on your psyche.”

That’s part of the reason Mc­Kinney, who had another capital trial last summer, has left criminal defense and joined a civil practice specializing in railroad litigation.

“If you pour your heart and soul into the work of representing individuals charged with the most heinous allegations of homicide, and you do that for an extended period of time, I think it does weigh on you,” he said. “It’s difficult to do that work at a high level forever.”

Charleston, S.C.

Nathan Williams was the lead prosecutor in the federal capital case against Dylann Roof, convicted and sentenced to die for killing nine Black people in the Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., on June 17, 2015.

Roof was the first person in the federal court system to be sentenced to death for a hate crime.

Williams recalls how hard it was to find the balance of being thorough but not being exploitative of the victims and their families. To do that, he said, meant spending a lot of time with the survivors and victims’ families and knowing their stories.

“It’s not easy,” he said. But, he added, “(it’s) one of the best parts of being a prosecutor.”

After the verdict, Williams was moved by the words he heard from the victims and their families.

“I was surprised and humbled they thanked me,” he said, “because it felt like a privilege to be doing.”

For Williams, it wasn’t just winning the case.

“I think the pressure is not so much to get the right verdict but to get the case presented a certain way to respect the victims,” he said. “You worry in a case like Bowers and Roof, with a lot of victims, if you don’t get it all done right, there’s a sense there wasn’t justice.

“It’s a lot of pressure.”

Baumhammers

Bill Difenderfer, who represented Baumhammers, has tried six death penalty cases and has one pending.

He loves trial work.

But in the Baumhammers case, Difenderfer said, it was clear the trial would not be about winning a not-guilty verdict. It was not a whodunit.

“The synagogue, like Baumhammers — you’re not winning the case. The evidence is overwhelming,” he said. “The family never had expectations Robert would ever be free again. It was all about the death penalty.”

There were 72 fact witnesses. Difenderfer remembers Borkowski from the DA’s office presenting ballistics evidence.

“The jury was falling asleep,” he said.

Although Difenderfer could have accepted the accuracy of that evidence and avoided the testimony, he didn’t want to. He wanted the jurors to fall asleep — because maybe it would make them like him and his client more.

“They’ve got to do A to Z, put every single thing in that they have,” he said. “The prosecution has to (present its case) 100%.”

That’s because, Borkowski said, nothing can be taken for granted.

In the Baumhammers case, there were six crime scenes. It was important to go through each one thoroughly and methodically at trial, Borkowski said, “to reflect the same methodical nature of his conduct and the intent necessary to prove first-degree murder.”

Baumhammers was the first of three death penalty cases Borkowski tried between May 2001 and May 2002.

He also prosecuted the case against Ronald Taylor, who was convicted of killing three people in Wilkinsburg in March 2000, and Joe Cornelius, who was convicted of second-degree murder for killing an 11-year-old boy.

Borkowski remembers the Baumhammers case having extensive media coverage. He didn’t worry about that.

“I always felt the pressure of preparation,” he said.

He also felt the pressure that came from his responsibility as a prosecutor “to fulfill my obligation to the surviving family members.”

Trial provides family members with a focus and an outlet to direct their anger and fears, Borkowski said.

“That can be a good thing,” he said. “But it’s also short term because once the trial is over and sentencing is done, they’re still left with an empty bedroom, an empty house.

“The case is over for you, but not for them. They’re living with it for the rest of their lives.”