Dylann Roof is accused of killing nine people at a Charleston, South Carolina church last summer, and was charged with 33 federal offenses and received the death penalty.
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After being found guilty of killing nine churchgoers in Charleston church a year ago, accused mass murderer Dylann Roof has chose to challenge the death penalty.
Roof’s attorneys filed the motion stating that they would drop the challenge if prosecutors dropped their pursuit of the death sentence in his case.
Roof’s defense team presented their arguments in a 40-page document and acknowledged that the case’s facts are “indisputably grave”, which partially reveals why the team wants to turn the death penalty on its head. “It’s that it’s a federal death penalty case in the context of a hate crime – so you have this ambitious use of the death penalty – after [the Supreme Court case], when Breyer signaled that he thought the death penalty was unconstitutional”. He told police he’d been hoping to spark a race war.
Roof is accused of gunning down nine parishioners Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in June 2015. Why the complication? The challenge comes from the prosecution’s unwillingness to accept Roof’s guilty pleas and multiple life sentences without parole.
Photos of Dylann Storm Roof from a white supremascist website emerged after he was collared for the Charleston massacre. The federal trial against Roof is set to begin on November 7.
Attorney General Loretta Lynch announced in May that she would seek the death penalty for Roof, saying that “the nature of the alleged crime and the resulting harm compelled this decision”. In instances of cases that would permit the death penalty, the process is called “death qualification”, or finding a jury willing to condemn someone to death.
There are other cases where the federal death penalty is under challenge – take the case of Donald Fell in Vermont recently, where a federal judge finished a nine-day hearing over issues raised by his lawyers about the constitutionality of the death penalty. This suspension on executions lasted until 1976 when several states introduced reforms aimed at improving the system by which the death penalty was imposed.
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All the information concerning this trial already looks like a description of a very clever attempt to set the mass murderer free.
