The brutal attack left nine African-American parishioners dead, including the church’s head pastor.
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Dylann Roof faces multiple murder counts and federal hate crimes for the deadly shooting in June 2015 at a church in SC.
Lawyers for Dylann Roof, the man who shot and killed nine black men and women at a church in Charleston, South Carolina, filed a motion to challenge the federal government’s ability to seek the death penalty for their client, saying the punishment would be unconstitutional.
Attorneys in Dylann Roof’s federal trial asked to have the death penalty ruled out as his potential punishment. Attempts to include a maximum penalty of death in the federal Hate Crimes Prevention Act failed before it was passed in 2009.
In the motion, his lawyers emphasize that they are challenging the death penalty only because the federal government has rejected his offer to plead guilty in exchange for multiple life sentences without parole.
It continued: “The [Federal 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”. Roof faces the death penalty on both state and federal murder charges. Prosecutors in that case have not said if they will pursue the death penalty.
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.
“To carry out these twin goals of fanning racial flames and exacting revenge, Roof further chose to seek out and murder African Americans due to their race”.
The Department of Justice now has a moratorium on executions during a review of federal death penalty policy and, the Washington Post reported previous year, does not have enough lethal injection drug to execute anyone.
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Photo of accused church shooter Dylann Roof posing with a Confederate flag. Roof’s federal trial is set for November. Gannett said “i$3 t is well understood that, thanks to death-qualification, ‘capital juries are more likely to be white, older, predominately male, Protestant, and less educated than other criminal juries. then the society from which they were picked”.
