Charleston church shooter Dylann Roof’s death sentence upheld

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A federal appeals court on Wednesday upheld the conviction and sentence of Charleston church shooter and white supremacist Dylann Roof, who was sentenced to death for the June 2015 racist mass shooting at Emanuel AME.

Dylann Roof sentence upheld

Roof’s appeal was rejected by an unanimous three-judge panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond. The proclaimed white supremacist he was incompetent to stand trial in the shootings at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston.

In 2017, Roof became the first person in the U.S. sentenced to death for a federal hate crime. Roof opened fire during the closing prayer of a Bible study at the church. He was 21 at the time.

Appeal

In his appeal, Roof’s attorneys argued that he was wrongly allowed to represent himself during sentencing, a critical phase of his trial. Roof successfully prevented jurors from hearing evidence about his mental health status, “under the delusion,” his attorneys argued, that “he would be rescued from prison by white-nationalists — but only, bizarrely, if he kept his mental-impairments out of the public record.”

Roof’s lawyers said his convictions and death sentence should be vacated or his case should be sent back to court for a “proper competency evaluation.”

Despite their arguments, the 4th Circuit found that the trial judge did not commit an error when he found Roof was competent to stand trial and issued a blistering rebuke of Roof’s crimes.

“Dylann Roof murdered African Americans at their church, during their Bible-study and worship. They had welcomed him. He slaughtered them. He did so with the express intent of terrorizing not just his immediate victims at the historically important Mother Emanuel Church, but as many similar people as would hear of the mass murder,” the panel wrote in its ruling.

“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 judges wrote.