Lawyers representing Dylann Roof, the white man accused of killing nine black members of a historic Charleston, S.C., church last summer, filed a motion challenging the constitutionality of the death penalty after federal prosecutors declined his offer to serve life without parole.
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The motion filed Monday targets both the death penalty itself and the federal death penalty law. “T$3 his motion.is being filed exclusively as a result of the government’s decision to seek the defendant’s execution rather than accepting his proffered pleas of guilty”, they wrote.
“The nature of the alleged crime and the resulting harm compelled this decision”, Attorney General Loretta Lynch said in May, explaining the resolution to pursue the death penalty against Roof.
They outlined several reasons against the federal death penalty calling it “unconstitutional punishment” and that such “arbitrary, cruel and unusual punishment” violated both the Fifth and Eighth Amendments.
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.
The 22-year-old Roof is accused of shooting nine churchgoers at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church on June 17, 2015.
Roof’s lawyers further stated that the Charleston shooter would be willing to withdraw his challenge if federal prosecutors, who have been pushing for the gunman to be given a death sentence for his crimes, would withdraw their initiative to grant the death penalty to the case.
The motion calls on the court to declare the act unconstitutional and allow Roof to plead guilty in exchange for life in prison without the possibility of release. They based their argument on the findings of the Capital Jury Project, which interviewed almost 2,000 jurors from more than 350 trials in over and dozen states and identified “seven deadly sins” of capital juries and jury selection procedure that, the lawyers say, unfairly increases the likelihood of a death verdict.
The federal trial is scheduled to begin November 7. No official date has been set for the federal trial yet.
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“D$3 espite Congress’s deliberate decision not to provide for the death penalty in HCPA prosecutions, the government has effectively amended the statute to permit a death sentence to be imposed”, the lawyers argue.
