March 22, 2024 | 12 Adar II 5784
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10.27 Healing Partnership aims California to demystify appeals process for resident arrested synagogue shooting case for threatening former Tree of Life executive director
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Law professor combats anti-Zionism LOCAL Ovit, ommodi remos ero
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LOCAL Fodictiumqui aut entis andae asimuss Patel campaign gets a boost inPage X 14th Ward LOCAL Minto volupta ssimim
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James A. Byrne U.S. Courthouse in Philadelphia
Photo by Carol M. Highsmith, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division
By David Rullo | Senior Staff Writer
W
hile the Pittsburgh synagogue shooter’s trial concluded more than seven months ago with a death penalty sentence, 10.27 Healing Partnership Executive Director Maggie Feinstein knows there are still related challenges ahead for Pittsburgh’s Jewish community. Case in point is the start of the appeals process, still in its nascent stages. “When we’re talking about communal trauma, one of our primary goals is that people are given the opportunity to anticipate what’s coming, predicate how it’s going to land with them and prepare themselves for it, however is appropriate,” Feinstein said. To help achieve that goal, the 10.27 Healing Partnership recently hosted the “Legal Appeals Process Educational Program” taught by David Harris, the Sally Ann Semenko endowed chair and professor of law at the University of Pittsburgh. The intent, Feinstein said, is to ensure that people have access to information about the
legal system and the appeals process. “No one should feel as though it’s being talked about around them without an opportunity for understanding it,” she said. It’s important to demystify the appeals process because it isn’t as familiar as the guilt and penalty phases of a trial, which most people have at least seen in movies or television programs, Harris said. “We know that cases get appealed, and they go into something called an appeals court and some months, or even a year, later something pops out — but we don’t know why it happens, how it happens, what goes on,” he said. A trial, Harris said, is about facts and the law as applied to those facts. A jury, he explained, listens to the prosecution’s and defense’s versions of a story, and then evaluates what happened, applying the law as it’s given to them by a judge. An appeal, Harris explained, doesn’t debate facts, witnesses or exhibits, and features no testimony. It is only about the law and legal
Flowers left outside the Tree of Life building on Oct. 27, 2020
Photo by Adam Reinherz
By David Rullo | Senior Staff Writer
I
t was only a few weeks after the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting that Joel Goldstein received his first voicemail message from Melanie Harris. He said the call was strange and filled with antisemitic terms. “I had never encountered anything like that before in a public setting, and it took me a minute or two to gather my thoughts,” Goldstein said. Goldstein is a former executive director of Tree of Life*Or L’Simcha congregation. He resigned a few months before the 2018 shooting at the building and was still mourning the friends he had lost. The message from Harris was just the first in an odyssey that would traverse three states and nearly five years. It would include Goldstein, his wife Linda Myers, Myers’ child J.E. Reich, the AntiDefamation League, several police forces and the FBI.
Please see Appeals, page 10
2023–2024
Please see Arrest, page 10
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