On Wednesday, a federal appeals court upheld Dylann Roof’s death penalty conviction for killing nine Black parishioners in a South Carolina church in 2015.
The three-judge panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously upheld the decision. They rejected an argument from Roof’s attorneys that the trial judge ignored testimony about his mental illness.
“No cold record or careful parsing of statutes and precedents can capture the full horror of what Roof did. His crimes qualify him for the harshest penalty that a just society can impose,” the decision read.
Roof’s attorneys argued that he should never have been allowed to represent himself during sentencing. Roof successfully kept jurors from hearing evidence about his mental health. He thought “he would be rescued from prison by white-nationalists — but only, bizarrely, if he kept his mental impairments out of the public record,” they said.
His legal team is expected to appeal the ruling to the Supreme Court. However, the federal government issued a moratorium on all federal executions while the Justice Department reviews the death penalty policies. The decision to halt executions comes on the heels of Donald Trump’s administration’s unprecedented run of executions carried out at the end of his term.
Roof was sentenced to death in 2017, becoming the first person in the United States to receive the death sentence for a hate crime. Overwhelming evidence painting Roof as a white supremacist was presented at the trial, including his own writings. The shooting was deliberate with the intention of starting a race war.
Following the federal trial, he received nine life sentences after pleading guilty to murder charges on the state level.
Discover more from Baller Alert
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
