BUFFALO, New York (CNN) — James Charles Kopp had wanted his trial on charges of shooting an abortion provider to be a platform for his anti-abortion views.

On Monday, instead of a month-long forum to try to justify violence in defense of the unborn, Kopp and his attorneys will be all but silenced in what is expected to be a one-day proceeding before a state judge.

When the trial begins in Erie County court, there will be no jury -- a right Kopp waived last week. There will also be no witnesses, following Kopp's proposal to stipulate the agreed facts of the case, a proposal accepted by prosecutors and Judge Michael D'Amico.

Instead of testimony, the court will hear a 30-page summary of the evidence, with exhibits, pertaining to the nighttime sniper shooting of Dr. Barnett Slepian on October 23, 1998, in his home in the Buffalo suburb of Amherst, New York.

"My facts go in uncontested," Erie County District Attorney Frank Clark said. "It is a synopsis of all of the evidence we would have elicited."

Kopp faces a maximum of 25 years to life in prison on charges of second-degree murder and reckless depraved murder.

"I am going to look over the evidence and give it some thought for a day or two before I would render a decision," D'Amico said after granting Kopp his jury waiver.

The move toward a stipulation-only bench trial came on the eve of the final phase of jury selection. The court had whittled down the jury pool to 150 through a review of a 16-page questionnaire. The document probed potential jurors' backgrounds, views on abortion and knowledge of the case, and asked them how often they read The Buffalo News, which published a confessional jailhouse interview with Kopp in November.

In the interview, Kopp said he intended to wound Slepian to prevent him from performing abortions.

"I did it, and I'm admitting it. But I never, ever intended for Dr. Slepian to die," the newspaper quoted Kopp as saying.

The evidence against Kopp includes the high-powered, Russian-made rifle he bought at a pawn shop in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1997 and buried in the woods behind Slepian's house, prosecutors said.

Prosecutors said the weapon was found with Kopp's binoculars and a baseball cap that contained Kopp's hair fibers.

Family won't have to testify

The abbreviated format should provide relief for Slepian's family members and friends, who won't have to listen to or participate in what might have been several weeks of sometimes painful testimony.

Slepian's widow, Lynne, has never publicly discussed the case. She was to be among 60 prosecution witnesses.

Lynne Slepian was near her husband, who was heating soup, when a .30-caliber bullet pierced a kitchen window and hit him in the back, mortally wounding him. The older two of the couple's four sons were watching a hockey game on television in an adjacent room.

"There'll be none of the uncertainties of having witness recollections challenged and none of the down side of having my witnesses cross-examined," Clark said.

Slepian, 52, was a popular obstetrician-gynecologist who had delivered thousands of babies. He also worked up to eight hours a week at the only clinic in the region that provided abortions. He had long been the target of anti-abortion protesters.

History of anti-abortion activism

Kopp, 48, a microbiologist and one-time professional trumpeter from California, had been arrested dozens of times in anti-abortion demonstrations around the country going back to the mid-1980s. He specialized in blocking clinic entrances by locking himself to other activists.

Kopp's lead defense attorney, Bruce Barkett, said the brief trial will not prevent the political dimensions of the case from being raised.

"The public forum is still there, albeit much shorter," he said. "We will make our point through our submission to the court and what will be a very brief statement by me in the form of a summation," Barkett said.

Barkett said Kopp's agenda in the trial goes beyond acquittal. But, he said, he and Kopp concluded that the opportunity to make political and moral points in a jury trial would be limited, as would the odds of Kopp being convicted on the lesser charge of manslaughter, a possibility he forfeited with the stipulation.

"The chances of Jim and I convincing a jury they should give Jim his rifle back and be on his way were slim at best," Barkett said.

Years as fugitive

In a pretrial hearing, Kopp's friend Jennifer Rock testified that she drove him to Mexico in late 1998.

Law enforcement sources say Kopp later fled to the United Kingdom and lived there incognito before moving to France, where he was captured in March 2001.

He had been a fugitive for two-and-half years and was on the FBI's most-wanted list.

Before extradition, which took more than a year, the United States promised France that Kopp would not face execution.

Kopp also faces federal charges of using deadly force against an abortion provider, and is suspected in similar, nonfatal shootings in the mid-1990s of three doctors in Canada and one in Rochester, New York.

Slepian was the seventh abortion provider killed in the United States between 1993 and 1998, according to the National Abortion Rights Action League.