In an earlier court filing, federal prosecutors cited a number of factors for seeking the death penalty, saying Roof singled out victims who were black and elderly, and showed no remorse. “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.
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“The death penalty – in and of itself – constitutes an unconstitutional punishment”, Roof’s lawyers wrote. 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.
In the 34-page motion filed late Monday in US District Court in Charleston, Roof’s lawyers acknowledged that “the facts of this case are indisputably grave”.
Former North Charleston officer Michael Slager goes on trial in October on a murder charge. He is accused of killing nine black worshippers at a Bible study in the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina.
Roof, 22, is accused of killing nine people inside a historic African-American church in Charleston, S.C., on June 17, 2015 with the intentions of starting a race war. Most notably, a federal judge in Vermont just recently finished a nine-day hearing over issues raised by Donald Fell’s lawyers about the constitutionality of the death penalty in the federal stystem.
A year ago a federal grand jury in SC indicted Roof on 33 counts of federal hate crimes and firearm charges. They outline a solid summary of how legal opinion across the county has shifted against the death penalty in the last few years.
Attorneys in Dylann Roof’s federal trial asked to have the death penalty ruled out as his potential punishment. “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”, it added.
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.
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Roof’s lawyers added that their client will “withdraw this motion and plead guilty as charged to all counts in the indictment” if federal prosecutors withdraw the death penalty. Why the complication? The challenge comes from the prosecution’s unwillingness to accept Roof’s guilty pleas and multiple life sentences without parole.
