Lawyers for the man accused of fatally shooting nine people at a Charleston, South Carolina, church are arguing that the death penalty is unconstitutional.
Advertisement
Lawyers for the 22-yearold Roof filed the motion Monday, saying a flawed process of sitting juries willing to recommend the death penalty violates the rights of potential jurors and defendants.
Roof’s lawyers also challenged how the jury for Roof would be selected. Roof faces the death penalty on both state and federal murder charges.
The judge who is presiding over the case, Richard Gergel, did not immediately rule out the filing to challenge the death penalty.
There’s a new development in the Dylann Roof trial. Supreme Court Justices Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg have both said they believe the death penalty “likely constitutes a legally prohibited ‘cruel and unusual punishment, ‘” while the Connecticut Supreme Court outlawed the death penalty previous year. In 1972, following a landmark Supreme Court decision, the death penalty was effectively suspended in the United States with justices ruling on the arbitrary nature in which these punishments were handed down.
“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”. “The results of jurors’ good-faith grappling with the law-arbitrary, biased, and erroneous death verdicts-are intolerable as a matter of due process and proportional punishment”.
They say that Roof has offered to plead guilty and “accept multiple sentences of life imprisonment without possibility of release”.
Continuing their argument against the possible execution of Roof, his attorneys claim that prosecutors have supplanted a decision by Congress not to authorize the death sentence for federal hate crimes, of which he is accused.
Advertisement
Federal prosecutors spent months deciding whether to pursue the death penalty but finally filed papers announcing their intention in May, arguing that the killer “demonstrated a lack of remorse”. He also faces the death penalty in state court, where he is charged with murder and has a trial set to begin early next year.
