The shooter convicted of killing five people at a Colorado Springs L.G.B.T.Q. nightclub in 2022 pleaded guilty on Tuesday to federal hate crimes and was sentenced to 55 life terms in prison on those charges.
In federal court in Denver, U.S. District Judge Charlotte N. Sweeney listened to testimony from more than a dozen surviving victims of the shooting and loved ones of people who were killed before accepting the sentence in the plea agreement. She then addressed the shooter, Anderson Lee Aldrich, 24, directly.
“This community is stronger than your armor, stronger than your weapons, and it’s sure as heck stronger than your hatred,” Judge Sweeney said.
Last year, the shooter pleaded guilty to dozens of state charges of murder and attempted murder, but pleaded no contest to hate crimes charges. At the time, several survivors of the attack said it was important that the shooter acknowledged bias, and wanted recognition that the nightclub patrons were attacked because of their identities, in a massacre deliberately calculated to shatter an L.G.B.T.Q. sanctuary in Colorado Springs.
At the hearing on Tuesday, prosecutors said the plea agreement, which also included firearms charges, provided that acknowledgment.
“This plea requires an admission of guilt, that these were hate crimes,” said Alison M. Connaughty, an assistant U.S. attorney. Under the agreement, federal prosecutors did not seek the death penalty.
Ms. Connaughty described the shooting at the L.G.B.T.Q. club, named Club Q, as premeditated. She added that in online communications the shooter had used anti-L.G.B.T.Q. slurs and shared 911 recordings from the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, where 49 people were killed in 2016.
The five people killed in the Colorado Springs shooting ranged in age from 22 to 40. More than 20 others were injured.
“You targeted this community where it lives and breathes,” Judge Sweeney said.
The shooter’s lawyer, David Kraut, said his client had endured “more than their fair share” of trauma. Drugs, online extremism and the availability of guns were risk factors contributing to the crime but did not explain or excuse it, Mr. Kraut said.
As victims of the shooting and people who lost loved ones testified, some of them asked Judge Sweeney to consider the death penalty.
“You need to pay with your life,” Cheryl Norton, whose daughter Ashtin Gamblin was wounded, said of the shooter.
Judge Sweeney said the death penalty was not an option because prosecutors had not sought it, and imposing it would require a jury and could lead to drawn-out appeals.
Federal prosecutors have in the past sought the death penalty against defendants in mass shootings who were charged with hate crimes. The gunman who killed nine Black worshipers at a church in Charleston in 2015 was the first person in the United States sentenced to death for a federal hate crime.
But the Justice Department has recently taken a mixed approach to pursuing capital sentences.
President Biden campaigned on ending the federal death penalty, promising to pause federal executions when he took office in 2021. That year, the Justice Department, under Attorney General Merrick Garland, imposed a moratorium on federal executions.
The Justice Department did not seek the death penalty against the man who killed 23 people in an attack targeting Hispanic people at a Walmart in El Paso in 2019.
But in January this year, federal prosecutors said they would pursue the death penalty against the gunman who killed 10 Black people in a racist massacre at a Buffalo supermarket in May 2022.
Content Source: www.nytimes.com