After being found guilty of killing nine churchgoers in Charleston church previous year, accused mass murderer Dylann Roof has chose to challenge the death penalty.
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Roof’s defense team argues that the death penalty itself is too “arbitrary” for two reasons: (1) The Federal Death Penalty Act’s standards are too vague in defining what crimes are worthy of the death penalty and which ones are more fitting for a life sentence; (2) Juries and courts don’t possess a uniform, unbiased way of interpreting these standards.
Roof, a high school dropout, is charged with shooting people participating in a Bible study class at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in downtown Charleston on June 17, 2015.
The lawyers also raise several other challenges relating to Roof’s charges, and to the sentencing procedures at issue in a federal death penalty trial.
Dylann Roof was captured in North Carolina a day after the shootings.
Roof’s federal trial is set for November 7 in U.S. District Court.
The lawyers also point out that the practice of selecting a jury that requires “death qualification” can not be controlled for prejudice. “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”. A separate, state murder trial is scheduled for January 2017.
File picture of Dylann Roof, the man charged with murdering nine worshippers at a historic black church in Charleston last month, listens to the proceedings with assistant defense attorney William Maguire during a hearing at the Judicial Center in Charleston, South Carolina July 16, 2015.
Though the justice department says it is committed to seeking the death penalty, federal executions are actually exceedingly rare.
The lawyers say in the motion that the law, enacted 40 years ago to offer direction in death penalty cases, does not give an adequate definition of a crime deserving the death penalty and arbitrarily leaves the decision to juries and courts. Since potential jurors in capital cases must be willing to consider sentencing a person to death, those who outright oppose the death penalty in all cases are excluded from the jury.
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The filing Monday came only after the court rejected, which w give him multiple life sentences in prison with no chance for parole, according to the 34-page motion filed by the three attorneys for Roof.
