Roof’s lawyers filed a motion Monday stating that the death penalty and federal death penalty law violate the 5th and 8th Amendments, as reported by CBS News.
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A SC prosecutor said Thursday, Sept. 3, 2015, that she will seek the death penalty for Roof, who is charged with killing nine black churchgoers in Charleston.
If federal prosecutors drop the pursuit of the death penalty, Roof’s lawyers say they will drop the challenge. However, the federal government rejected this request, and as of now the death penalty remains on the table.
The 22-year-old Roof is accused of shooting nine churchgoers at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church on June 17, 2015.
The Charleston shooting shook the country and intensified debate over race relations in the country, which were already under strain after numerous high-profile police killings of unarmed black people.
The judge who is presiding over the case, Richard Gergel, did not immediately rule out the filing to challenge the death penalty.
The attorneys contend that while the death penalty act “may have been designed with as much care as possible under the circumstances, the capital sentencing process that the statute provides is constitutionally inadequate in practice”. He also faces the death penalty in state court where he is charged with murder in a trial set to begin early next year.
This suspension on executions lasted until 1976 when several states introduced reforms aimed at improving the system by which the death penalty was imposed.
Pointing to a potential bias in jury selection, Roof’s attorneys claim that the selection process for capital cases violates a defendant’s right to a fair and impartial jury due to what is referred to as the “death qualification”.
Capital punishment is rarely carried out in federal cases in the U.S., but prosecutors in the case cited a number of factors for seeking the death penalty.
Roof faces different charges in each case. The Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal from a death row inmate, John Wayne Connor, just last month.
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Roof’s defense was careful to note that their challenge stemmed from the prosecution’s refusal to accept their client’s guilty pleas, despite his willingness to accept multiple life sentences without the possibility for parole.
