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The Justice Department should pursue the death penalty against Elias Rodriguez for the first-degree premeditated executions of Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky on May 21st outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington D.C.
This is a sober decision to make, but not a difficult one. It’s exactly the kind of case where the death penalty is warranted.
Before getting into why the accused richly deserves the ultimate punishment, let me state clearly that Rodriguez is presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty in a court of law beyond a reasonable doubt.
SHOOTING AT CAPITAL JEWISH MUSEUM HIGHLIGHTS RISING WAVE OF ANTI-JEWISH HATE CRIMES
First, according to the Criminal Complaint filed against the accused, he murdered foreign officials and committed first-degree murder. Criminal complaints are placeholders and are the first step in a process that leads to a formal indictment, which is imminent.
No doubt, as additional evidence is gathered, more charges will be added, some may be altered, and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia (where I used to work as a prosecutor) will seek an indictment of the accused. A grand jury, which meets in secret, only needs to find probable cause to believe that the accused committed the crimes listed in the indictment.
That is a forgone conclusion; he will be indicted in the coming days.
Second, this isn’t a whodunnit. Not only are there eyewitnesses to the crimes, but there is video surveillance. On top of that, once the forensic evidence is tested, the accused’s DNA, fingerprints, and other inculpatory evidence tied to the accused will be developed and available for trial.
Any one of those pieces of evidence, both direct and circumstantial, could be sufficient to prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt.
But there’s more: the accused told the officers at the scene that he “did it,” and blurted out “I did it for Palestine, I did it for Gaza, I am unarmed.”
Third, this wasn’t a heat of passion or spontaneous act by the accused. Not only did he fly from Chicago to D.C. with a 9mm handgun (in his checked luggage), he purchased a ticket to the Museum event three hours before it started, walked behind the two victims as they exited, and shot them numerous times. As Sarah tried to crawl away, the accused shot her again. Sarah sat up for a moment. The accused reloaded and fired several shots into her body.
Video surveillance captured this horrible scene.
Fourth, law enforcement officers recovered 21 expended 9mm cartridges from the scene, a 9mm magazine, and a 9mm handgun with its slide locked, indicating that it had expended all of its ammunition. The handgun was registered to the accused in Illinois, where he purchased the weapon in 2020.
The federal death penalty is authorized for several crimes, including first-degree murder. The Trump administration wisely reinstated the use of the federal death penalty for appropriate cases, and Attorney General Pam Bondi issued revised guidance with respect to the process by which federal prosecutors may seek the death penalty.
Although there are 93 United States Attorney’s Offices spread around the country, if any office wants to seek the death penalty, they must request to do so by submitting their justification memo to the Capital Case Section of Main Justice in Washington D.C. The process requires a pre-indictment review, consultation with the victim’s family, and a thorough review by the Capital Review Committee, composed of seasoned prosecutors.
Since the death penalty was reinstated by the Supreme Court in 1976, there have been 1,625 executions, most of which took place at the state level. Today, 27 states have the death penalty. There are only three federal death row prisoners awaiting execution as of today (there were 40, but President Biden commuted the sentences of 37 vicious killers just before leaving office). Fifty-five percent of those executed have been white, 34% have been black, and 8% have been Hispanic.
Death penalty trials have two phases: the guilt phase and the sentencing phase. If an accused is found guilty of a death-eligible offense by a jury, then the case proceeds to the sentencing phase.
In federal death penalty cases, the government must prove that the aggravating factors outweigh the mitigating factors. Aggravating factors for homicide include death during the commission of another crime, a previous conviction of a violent felony involving a firearm, previous conviction of other serious offenses, or a heinous, cruel, or depraved manner of committing an offense.
Mitigating factors include impaired capacity, duress, no prior criminal record, and others.
Given the fact that the accused hunted down and executed two helpless victims, shot them in the back, shot them when they were on the ground, shot Sarah as she tried to crawl away, reloaded, and shot Sarah again, the government will likely proceed on the theory that the accused’s actions were heinous, cruel, and depraved, and argue that those factors far outweigh any mitigating factors.
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In the 1996 fictional movie “A Time to Kill,” set in the deep south, a 10-year-old African American girl named Tonya was abducted, raped, and beaten by two redneck white men, who, after throwing full beer cans at her and unsuccessfully trying to hang her, threw her off a bridge into a river. Tonya survived. The men were arrested. But before they were tried, Tonya’s father, Carl Lee Hailey, shot and killed them in the courthouse, fearing that an all-white southern jury would acquit the monsters. Carl Lee went on trial for their murder, and was represented by Jake Brigance, played by Matthew McConaughey.
During his closing argument to the jury, Jake asked the jury to close their eyes as he described the brutal rape of Tonya.
“This is the story about a little girl walking home from a grocery store one sunny afternoon…suddenly a truck races up, two men jump out and grab her, they drag her into a nearby field, and they tie her up, they rip her clothes from her body, now they climb on, first one then the other, raping her, shattering everything innocent and pure, vicious thrusts, in a fog of drunken breath and sweat. When they are done, after they killed her tiny womb, murdered any chance of her to bear children, to have life beyond her own, they sat and used her for target practice.”
As he describes the hanging and then how they threw her over the bridge to the creek bottom 30 feet below, he asks the jury, “Can you see her? Her raped, beaten, broken body, soaked in their urine, soaked in their semen, soaked in her blood, left to die. Can you see her? I want you to picture that little girl.”
After a long pause, he says, “Now imagine she’s white.”
With that in mind, try this thought experiment: imagine Sarah and Yaron were black, and the accused was a white supremacist who shot them coming out of a function at the National Museum of African American History and Culture. After he was apprehended by the police, he said “I did it for the KKK, I did it for the Confederacy.”
Sarah and Yaron deserve justice. Justice, in this case, is the ultimate punishment.
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