Roof, 22, faces 33 federal charges, including hate crime and religious freedom violations and using a firearm to commit murder, in the shooting deaths of nine people inside a Charleston, S.C., church in 2015.
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A SC prosecutor said Thursday, Sept. 3, 2015, that she will seek the death penalty for Roof, who is charged with killing nine black churchgoers in Charleston. For now, his federal defense team challenges the constitutionality of the death penalty.
Prosecutors suggested that Roof singled out people who were black and elderly, which was one of the factors that played a role in their decision to seek the death penalty.
Roof also faces weapons charges related to the shooting, which left nine parishioners dead at a Bible study.
Roof’s federal trial is set to begin on November 7, his state trial is scheduled for January 17, 2017. Afterward, he fled the state and was captured a day later in North Carolina. During the attack he hurled racial abuse, survivors told police. “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”.
“This court should declare the FDPA (Federal Death Penalty Act) unconstitutional and order that this case proceed as a non-capital case”, attorneys stated in the motion. 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. Attorney General Loretta Lynch then opted to pursue the death penalty after federal prosecutors determined the killer in these crimes lacked remorse.
Federal death sentences are very rare-the only federal inmate to be sentenced to death in the a year ago was Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.
The defense said should pursuit of the death penalty be dropped, “Mr. Roof will withdraw this motion and plead guilty as charged to all counts in the indictment”.
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Federal prosecutors established how Roof researched many historically black churches before settling on his target.
