After three hours of deliberation, jurors in the Charleston church shooting case of Dylann Roof have announced that they believe Roof should be sentenced to death.
The jury on Tuesday asked U.S. District Judge Richard Gergel for clarification on some of the mitigating factors they're being asked to consider, including if Roof could safely be confined if he were sentenced to life in prison. The judge told jurors to re-read the instructions he provided them to figure out what that means.
Jurors also asked to re-watch a speech by the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, who was one of the nine people Roof killed during a Bible study in 2015.
Roof was convicted of killing nine people. This is another chapter in the weak and hateful life of Dylann Roof. The victims’ families tried to sway the prosecution and the jury away from the death penalty as a punishment in Roof’s case.
“I want that guy every morning when he wakes up, and every time he has an opportunity for quiet and solitude, to think of what Tywanza said to him: ‘We mean you no harm. You don’t have to do this,’” said Andrew J. Savage III, a Charleston lawyer, referring to Tywanza Sanders, a 26-year-old man who died in the attack. Mr. Savage represents three survivors, including Mr. Sanders’s mother, and many family members of the victims who became known here as the Emanuel Nine.
But Ms. Lynch chose to seek the death penalty after a contentious review process that included South Carolina’s top federal prosecutor siding with Mr. Roof’s defense lawyers in their offer of a guilty plea in exchange for a life sentence. Ms. Lynch said that “the nature of the alleged crime and the resulting harm compelled this decision.”
The victims and their families were and are better people than Dylann Roof. These lives are the highest costs of racism and bigotry and hate.