[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----USA

[Rick Halperin]

Jan. 30




USA:

Tsarnaev lawyer wants no part of appeal defense


The acclaimed anti-death penalty defender who opened her argument for sparing 
the life of Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev with the shocking 
declaration, "It was him," now wants off his case, telling a federal court his 
appeal "would benefit from a fresh look."

Attorney Judy Clarke's legal acumen kept the likes of Olympic Park bomber Eric 
Rudolph and Unabomber Ted Kaczynski from facing execution before a jury 
sentenced Tsarnaev, 23, to die. She has asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 
First Circuit in Boston to replace her with fellow California legal eagle 
Clifford Gardner. Gardner's infamous clients include Scott Peterson, who is 
appealing his death sentence for the 2002 murder of his pregnant wife, Laci.

"This substitution would provide Mr. Tsarnaev with high-quality and 
cost-effective appellate representation," the motion to remove Clarke reads. 
"Mr. Gardner ... is one of the most experienced capital appellate and federal 
appellate lawyers in the United States. He has particular expertise 
representing high-profile defendants whose trial court proceedings resulted in 
voluminous, complicated records."

Tsarnaev has been held in the federal Supermax prison in Colorado since his 
trial wrapped in 2015. He signed off on the substitution of Gardner.

(source: Boston Herald)

*************************

Death Penalty Fast Facts


Here's a look at the death penalty in the United States.

Facts:

As of January 2017, Capital punishment is legal in 31 US states.

New Mexico and Nebraska abolished the death penalty in 2009 and 2015, 
respectively. The repeal was not retroactive, however. Inmates on death row in 
those states may still be executed.

Pennsylvania imposed a moratorium on executions in 2015.

Maryland abolished the death penalty in 2013. A year later, former governor, 
Martin O'Malley commuted the death sentences of four prisoners awaiting 
execution.

Since 1976, when the death penalty was reinstated by the US Supreme Court, 
1,444 people have been executed (as of January 19, 2017).

Since 1973, there have been 156 death row exonerations. 26 of them are from the 
state of Florida.

Federal Government:

The US government and US military have 62 people awaiting execution. (As of 
July 1, 2016)

The US government has executed 3 people since 1976.

Females:

There are 55 women on death row in the United States (as of July 1, 2016).

16 women have been executed since the reinstatement of the death penalty in 
1976.

Juveniles:

22 individuals were executed between 1985 and 2003 for crimes committed as 
juveniles.

March 1, 2005 - Roper v. Simmons. The Supreme Court rules that the execution of 
juvenile offenders is unconstitutional.

Clemency:

282 clemencies have been granted in the United States since 1976.

For federal death row inmates, the president alone has the power to grant a 
pardon.

Timeline:

1834 - Pennsylvania becomes the 1st state to move executions into correctional 
facilities, ending public executions.

1838 - Discretionary death penalty statutes are enacted in Tennessee.

1846 - Michigan becomes the 1st state to abolish the death penalty for all 
crimes except treason.

1890 - William Kemmler becomes the 1st person executed by electrocution.

1907-1917 - 9 states abolish the death penalty for all crimes or strictly limit 
it. By 1920, 5 of those states had reinstated it.

1924 - The use of cyanide gas is introduced as an execution method.

1930s - Executions reach the highest levels in American history, averaging 167 
per year.

June 29, 1972 - Furman v. Georgia. The Supreme Court effectively voids 40 death 
penalty statutes and suspends the death penalty.

1976 - Gregg v. Georgia. The death penalty is reinstated.

January 17, 1977 - A 10-year moratorium on executions ends with the execution 
of Gary Gilmore by firing squad in Utah.

1977 - Oklahoma becomes the 1st state to adopt lethal injection as a means of 
execution.

December 7, 1982 - Charles Brooks becomes the 1st person executed by lethal 
injection.

1984 - Velma Barfield of North Carolina becomes the 1st woman executed since 
reinstatement of the death penalty.

1986 - Ford v. Wainwright. Execution of insane persons is banned.

1987 - McCleskey v. Kemp. Racial disparities are not recognized as a 
constitutional violation of "equal protection of the law" unless intentional 
racial discrimination against the defendant can be shown.

1988 - Thompson v. Oklahoma. Executions of offenders age 15 and younger at the 
time of their crimes are declared unconstitutional.

1989 - Stanford v. Kentucky, and Wilkins v. Missouri. The Eighth Amendment does 
not prohibit the death penalty for crimes committed at age 16 or 17.

1994 - President Bill Clinton signs the Violent Crime Control and Law 
Enforcement Act that expands the federal death penalty.

1996 - The last execution by hanging takes place in Delaware, with the death of 
Billy Bailey.

January 31, 2000 - A moratorium on executions is declared by Illinois Governor 
George Ryan. Since 1976, Illinois is the 1st state to block executions.

2002 - Atkins v. Virginia. The Supreme Court rules that the execution of 
mentally retarded defendants violates the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and 
unusual punishment.

January 2003 - Before leaving office, Governor George Ryan grants clemency to 
all of the remaining 167 inmates on Illinois's death row, due to the flawed 
process that led to the death sentences.

June 2004 - New York's death penalty law is declared unconstitutional by the 
state's high court.

March 1, 2005 - Roper v. Simmons. The Supreme Court rules that the execution of 
juvenile killers is unconstitutional. The 5-4 decision tosses out the death 
sentence of a Missouri man who was 17-years-old when he murdered a St. Louis 
area woman in 1993.

December 2, 2005 - The execution of Kenneth Lee Boyd in North Carolina marks 
the 1,000th time the death penalty has been carried out since it was reinstated 
by the Supreme Court in 1976. Boyd, 57, is executed for the 1988 murders of his 
wife, Julie Curry Boyd, and father-in-law, Thomas Dillard Curry.

June 12, 2006 - The Supreme Court rules that death row inmates can challenge 
the use of lethal injection as a method of execution.

December 15, 2006 - Florida Governor Jeb Bush suspends the death penalty after 
the execution of prisoner Angel Diaz. Diaz had to be given two injections, and 
it took more than 30 minutes for him to die.

December 17, 2007 - Governor Jon Corzine signs legislation banning the death 
penalty in New Jersey. The death sentences of 8 men are commuted to life terms.

December 31, 2007 - Due to the de facto moratorium on executions, pending the 
Supreme Court's ruling, only 42 people in the US are executed in 2007. It is 
the lowest total in more than 10 years.

April 14, 2008 - In a 7-2 ruling, the Supreme Court upholds Kentucky's use of 
lethal injection. Between September 2007, when the Court took on the case, and 
April 2008 no one was executed in the US

March 18, 2009 - Governor Bill Richardson of New Mexico signs legislation 
repealing the death penalty in his state. His actions will not affect 2 
prisoners currently on death row, Robert Fry, who killed a woman in 2000, and 
Tim Allen, who killed a 17-year-old girl in 1994.

November 13, 2009 - Ohio becomes the 1st state to switch to a method of lethal 
injection using a single drug, rather than the 3-drug method used by other 
states.

2010 - Execution by firing squad is used for the last time in Utah, with the 
death of Ronnie Lee Gardner.

March 9, 2011 - Illinois Governor Pat Quinn announces that he has signed 
legislation eliminating the death penalty in his state, more than 10 years 
after the state halted executions.

March 16, 2011 - The Drug Enforcement Agency seizes Georgia's supply of 
thiopental, over questions of where the state obtained the drug. US 
manufacturer Hospira stopped producing the drug in 2009. The countries that 
still produce the drug do not allow it to be exported to the US for use in 
lethal injections.

May 20, 2011 - The Georgia Department of Corrections announces that 
pentobarbital will be substituted for sodium thiopental in the 3-drug lethal 
injection process.

July 1, 2011 - Lundbeck Inc., the company that makes pentobarbital (brand name 
Nembutal), the drug used in lethal injections, announces it will restrict the 
use of its product from prisons carrying out capital punishment. "After much 
consideration, we have determined that a restricted distribution system is the 
most meaningful means through which we can restrict the misuse of Nembutal. 
While the company has never sold the product directly to prisons and therefore 
can't make guarantees, we are confident that our new distribution program will 
play a substantial role in restricting prisons' access to Nembutal for misuse 
as part of lethal injection." Lundbeck also states that it "adamantly opposes 
the distressing misuse of our product in capital punishment."

July 7, 2011 - Humberto Leal Garcia, Jr., a Mexican national, is executed by 
lethal injection, in Texas for the 1994 kidnap, rape and murder of Adra Sauceda 
in San Antonio. Despite pleas from the US State Department and the White House, 
Texas Governor Rick Perry does not grant clemency and the US Supreme Court does 
not intervene.

November 22, 2011 - Governor John Kitzhaber of Oregon grants a reprieve to Gary 
Haugen, who was scheduled to be executed December 6. Kitzhaber, a licensed 
physician, also puts a moratorium on all state executions for the remainder of 
his term in office.

April 25, 2012 - Connecticut Governor Dannel Malloy signs S.B. 280, An Act 
Revising the Penalty for Capital Felonies, into law. The law goes into effect 
immediately and replaces the death penalty with life without the possibility of 
parole. The law is not retroactive to those already on death row.

June 22, 2012 - The Arkansas Supreme Court strikes down the state's execution 
law, calling the form of lethal injection the state uses unconstitutional.

August 7, 2012 - The Supreme Court allows the execution of Marvin Wilson, 54, a 
Texas inmate with low IQ.

November 6, 2012 - A measure to repeal the death penalty in California fails.

May 2, 2013 - Maryland's governor signs a bill repealing the death penalty. The 
legislation goes into effect October 1.

January 16, 2014 - Ohio executes inmate Dennis McGuire with a new combination 
of drugs, due to the unavailability of drugs such as pentobarbital. The state 
used a combination of the drugs midazolam, a sedative, and the painkiller 
hydromorphone, according to the state corrections department. According to 
witness Alan Johnson of the Columbus Dispatch, the whole execution process took 
24 minutes, and McGuire appeared to be gasping for air for 10 to 13 minutes.

February 11, 2014 - Washington Governor Jay Inslee announces that he is issuing 
a moratorium on death penalty cases during his term in office.

May 22, 2014 - Tennessee becomes the 1st state to make death by electric chair 
mandatory when lethal injection drugs are unavailable.

May 28, 2014 - A judge in Ohio issues an order temporarily suspending 
executions in the state so that authorities can further study new lethal 
injection protocols.

July 23, 2014 - Arizona uses a new combination of drugs for the lethal 
injection to execute convicted murderer Joseph Woods. After he was injected it 
took him nearly 2 hours to die. Witness accounts differ as to whether he was 
gasping for air or snoring as he died.

September 4, 2014 - The Oklahoma Department of Public Safety issues a report on 
the controversial April execution of inmate Clayton Lockett. Complications with 
the placement of an IV into Lockett played a significant role in problems with 
his execution, according to the report. An autopsy confirmed that Lockett died 
from the execution drugs and not from a heart attack, but many consider it 
botched nonetheless because it took 43 minutes for him to die.

November 19, 2014 - A Utah legislative committee votes 9-2 to endorse a bill 
that will allow the execution of condemned prisoners by firing squad if drugs 
needed for lethal injection are not available. The bill is scheduled to be 
heard by full Utah Legislature convening in January 2015.

December 22, 2014 - A US district court judge in Oklahoma rules that future 
scheduled executions may proceed after he denies a preliminary injunction 
request filed by 21 Oklahoma death row inmates stemming from the problematic 
execution of Clayton Lockett on April 29.

December 22, 2014 - Arizona's state-commissioned review board decides that the 
execution of Joseph Woods was "handled appropriately," but that it will be 
changing the combination they use in future executions from a 2-drug formula to 
a 3-drug formula, or a single-drug injection if the State can obtain it 
(pentobarbital).

December 31, 2014 - Outgoing Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley takes the 
state's last 4 inmates off death row, commuting their sentences to life in 
prison without parole in one of his final acts in office.

January 8, 2015 - Ohio announces that it is reincorporating thiopental sodium, 
a drug which it used in executions from 1999-2011, into its execution policy. 
The state is also dropping the 2-drug regimen of midazolam and hydromorphone.

January 23, 2015 - The Supreme Court agrees to hear a case concerning the 
lethal injection protocol in Oklahoma. The inmates claim that the state 
protocol violates the Constitution's prohibition on cruel and unusual 
punishment.

January 30, 2015 - The Ohio State Department of Rehabilitation and Correction 
announces it will delay the executions of seven death row inmates while 
searching for an adequate supply of drugs that complies with its new execution 
protocol.

February 13, 2015 - Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf halts all executions in his 
state, citing the state's "error prone" justice system and "inherent biases" 
among his reasons for the moratorium. The moratorium will be in place until a 
task force examining capital punishment in Pennsylvania issues its final 
report.

February 18, 2015 - Philadelphia District Attorney R. Seth Williams announces 
he has filed a petition to block Gov. Wolf halting executions. Williams says 
the moratorium is an "unconstitutional takeover of powers."

March 23, 2015 - Utah Governor Gary Herbert signs legislation making the firing 
squad an authorized method of death if the drugs required for lethal injection 
are unavailable.

May 20, 2015 - The Nebraska legislature passes a bill to repeal the state's 
death penalty and replace it with life without parole. The measure, which 
passed on a 32-15 vote, faces a promised veto from Gov. Pete Ricketts. State 
Sen. Ernie Chambers, the bill's sponsor and a member of the New Alliance Party, 
says he's confident supporters can muster the 30 votes necessary to override a 
veto.

June 29, 2015 - The Supreme Court rules, in a 5-4 decision, that the usage of 
the sedative, midazolam in lethal injections is not a violation of the 
constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment. Midazolam is 1 of 3 drugs 
that are combined to carry out the death penalty in Oklahoma. After the long, 
messy execution of Clayton Lockett on April 29, 2014 at the Oklahoma State 
Penitentiary, public safety officials conducted a review to determine whether 
midazolam is potent enough on its own to prevent severe pain when the deadly 
drugs are administered. They ultimately concluded that the sedative is safe and 
effective, even though the drug is not approved by the FDA as a general 
anesthetic for surgery.

October 19, 2015 - Ohio delays executions until 2017, citing difficulties 
getting the necessary drugs.

May 23, 2016 - The Supreme Court rules 7-1 in favor of black death row inmate 
Timothy Foster, who contended there was racial discrimination in his 1987 jury 
selection. He will now have the opportunity to argue for a new trial. "The 
focus on race in the prosecution's file plainly demonstrates a concerted effort 
to keep black prospective jurors off the jury," Chief Justice John Roberts 
wrote in the majority opinion.

August 2, 2016 - The Delaware Supreme Court rules the state's death penalty law 
unconstitutional. Attorney General Matt Denn later announces that he will not 
appeal the decision made by the state's high court.

December 8, 2016 - Once a temporary stay issued by Supreme Court Justice 
Clarence Thomas is lifted, Alabama executes Ronald B. Smith. According to a 
witness, during the 34-minute execution, the death row inmate coughed and 
heaved for about 13 minutes after the lethal injection process began.

(source: CNN)

*******************

Inside the Trial of Dylann Roof----The complicated moral calculations that 
followed a horrific crime.


Early on the morning of December 7th, a dozen officers from the Department of 
Homeland Security were stationed outside the federal courthouse at 85 Broad 
Street, in Charleston, South Carolina. It was warm out, and the officers looked 
both relaxed and alert, talking among themselves as they kept watch. The 
federal building is a bunker, all right angles and gray concrete, completed in 
1987. Across the street stands the county courthouse, designed by James Hoban, 
the architect of the White House, and diagonally opposite is the city hall, 
built in 1801. The federal building would mar what the American Planning 
Association calls one of the nation's "great streets," except that it is hidden 
by a red brick antebellum structure that faces the street - an architectural 
sleight of hand that says much about the reasons that the Homeland Security 
officers were on Broad Street that day.

The federal trial of Dylann Roof was commencing, 18 months after he shot and 
killed nine African-American congregants at the Emanuel African Methodist 
Episcopal Church, during evening Bible study, a crime he had confessed to on 
video in horrific detail and without remorse. The authorities were concerned 
that Roof, who repeatedly stated that he had committed the murders as a call to 
action for persecuted whites, had become a cause celebre for white 
nationalists. That movement had been exiled to the political fringes after the 
murders, but it had regained some visibility during the Presidential campaign.

2 days earlier, a jury had deadlocked in the trial of Michael Slager, a North 
Charleston police officer charged with murder in the death of Walter Scott, an 
unarmed 50-year-old black man, whom Slager had shot in the back as he ran from 
a traffic stop. When the judge declared a mistrial, Scott's mother invoked 
God's will toward justice, and the state's governor, Nikki Haley, cautioned 
patience until the state could retry the officer. Now some feared that, despite 
the confession and the overwhelming forensic evidence, something similar might 
occur in the Roof trial.

Judge Richard Gergel was presiding. He is an avuncular silver-haired man with a 
reputation for efficiency and a liberal bent; in 2014, he issued a ruling that 
same-sex couples have the right to marry in South Carolina, and he was 
responsible for installing a portrait of Jonathan Jasper Wright, the state's 
1st black Supreme Court justice, in the Court building. The courtroom was 
solemn as Roof entered, wearing a gray-and-black striped prison jumpsuit. He is 
now 22, but, with his blond hair in a fresh bowl cut, he appeared younger. He 
is small to the point of fragility, and his frame swam in the jumpsuit. He was 
charged with 33 felony counts; 12 of them were hate crimes, and 18 others, 
including firearm and religious-obstruction charges, were punishable by death.

The family members of the victims, their supporters, the church's new pastor, 
Eric Manning, and other clergy filled the benches on the right side of the 
courtroom. Roof's mother and his paternal grandparents sat in the 2nd row on 
the left. Many people had assumed that Roof was a representative of the 
disenfranchised white population whose narrative of loss had come to play an 
unexpectedly central role in the election. Roof dropped out of high school 
after repeating 9th grade and then dropped out of an online alternative school 
before later earning his G.E.D., but he did not grow up in poverty. His 
grandfather is a prominent real-estate attorney in Columbia. His father, who 
attended the trial sporadically, is a building contractor and owned several 
properties around the state. At the time of the shooting, Roof lived with his 
mother in a spacious home in Lexington, across the Congaree River from 
Columbia.

He had chosen to drive 2 hours to Charleston to commit his crime, he told the 
police, because the city is "historic." Mother Emanuel, as the church is known, 
traces its roots to 1816. It was a center of clandestine anti-slavery activity 
and, in 1822, when city officials discovered that congregants were planning a 
slave revolt, they burned the church to the ground. The current building was 
erected in 1891, on Calhoun Street, named for Vice-President John C. Calhoun, 
the intellectual progenitor of secession. The Calhoun monument, a column 80 
feet high, topped by a statue of the statesman, is half a block away. The 
monument and the church, which came to play a central role in the Southern 
civil-rights movement, stand like a statement and its rebuttal. Roof had drawn 
up a list of half a dozen churches before settling on Mother Emanuel. "I 
realize these people are not criminal," he said. "They're in church." He chose 
them, he explained, because killing a black drug dealer would not have 
generated the same attention.

The lead prosecutor was Jay Richardson, an Assistant U.S. Attorney, based in 
Columbia. He is a small dark-haired man who speaks in a commanding tone. Roof's 
mother sank down on the bench as he delivered his opening statement, which 
contained details of the crime that had previously been withheld from the 
press. At a certain point, she slumped over. It seemed for a moment that she 
had fainted, but she was taken to a hospital, and it was later learned that she 
had suffered a heart attack. She survived, but did not return for the remainder 
of the trial.

Richardson reported that Roof pulled into the church parking lot and sat in his 
car for some time, "contemplating," before going inside. He had loaded 8 clips 
of hollow-point ammunition for his Glock .45 semiautomatic handgun, because, 
Richardson implied, he wanted to have 88 bullets; the number is 
white-nationalist code for "Heil Hitler."

The most well known of Roof's victims was Emanuel's pastor, the Reverend 
Clementa Pinckney, who also served in the South Carolina State Senate. (He 
became a member of the state House of Representatives in 1996, when he was 23, 
the youngest African-American ever elected to the state's legislature.) 
Pinckney welcomed the newcomer, gave him a Bible, and offered him a chair next 
to him in the circle where the 12 attendees of the study group sat. Roof's 
motive was "retaliation for perceived offenses" against the white race, 
Richardson said. "He also talked about 'the call to arms,' the hope that his 
attack would agitate others, worsen race relations, increase racial tensions 
that would lead to a race war."

4 months before the shooting, the Equal Justice Initiative issued a report on 
the history of lynching in the United States after Reconstruction. There were a 
184 lynchings in South Carolina. The last occurred in 1947, when a mob beat, 
stabbed, and shot to death Willie Earle, a 24-year-old black man who had been 
accused of murdering a white cabdriver from Greenville. Strom Thurmond, who was 
then the governor, pushed for those responsible to be brought to trial, perhaps 
worried that the incident would undercut efforts to recast the state's brutish 
image. 31 white men were charged; all were acquitted. Richardson, in his 
opening, seemed to suggest that lynching had not ceased in South Carolina; it 
had just been on a 68-year hiatus. Later in the trial, he made that connection 
explicit, charging that Roof was guilty of "a modern-day lynching."

Few people in Charleston's legal community expressed interest in handling the 
defense, so the court appointed David Bruck to represent Roof. Bruck is 
originally from Montreal but attended law school in South Carolina and worked 
there for more than 20 years, both as a public defender and in private 
practice. He now teaches law in Virginia, at Washington and Lee University, 
where he also directs a death-penalty defense clinic; he almost exclusively 
takes on cases that involve the death penalty, which he views as both unjust 
and racist in its application. In 1983, he wrote a groundbreaking article for 
The New Republic, in which he argued that the imposition of capital punishment, 
a practice that reinforced the value of the lives of white victims over those 
of black ones, was as troubling as violent crime itself.

In 2015, Bruck served on the defense for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, during his federal 
trial for the Boston Marathon bombing. He had previously represented Susan 
Smith, a white South Carolina woman who, in 1994, drowned her 2 young sons in a 
lake and blamed the act on a fictional black carjacker. (Tsarnaev was sentenced 
to death; Smith was given a life sentence.) His thinking appears to be that if 
the lives of defendants charged with heinous crimes can be spared, so could the 
lives of those charged with lesser crimes. If the bar is raised high enough, 
the death penalty might never be applied.

Bruck's relationship with Roof had been difficult almost from the outset. The 
defense called for a competency assessment and moved to have Roof declared 
mentally unfit, which he vigorously resisted. Roof asked Judge Gergel to be 
allowed to represent himself, which he did, during the jury selection, then 
asked to have counsel reinstated for the guilt phase of the trial, but not for 
the penalty phase. That ultimately led to a 2nd competency hearing between the 
2 phases.

In the opening statement for the defense, Bruck, who seems almost congenitally 
soft-spoken, addressed the jury in such low tones that some family members had 
to lean forward in their seats in order to hear him. "The story that Mr. 
Richardson just finished telling you really did occur," he said, referring to 
the prosecutor's graphic recounting of the murders. Everyone, himself included, 
Bruck said, expected that the verdict "will be guilty." The jurors may have 
been wondering why there even was a trial, he said. Roof had offered to plead 
guilty in exchange for a life sentence but the Justice Department had not 
allowed it. Many people in Charleston thought that Loretta Lynch, the U.S. 
Attorney General, should have spared the families - and the city - the ordeal 
of a trial, but she ruled that the hate-crime elements of the case warranted 
the harshest sentence at the government's disposal. The federal hate-crime 
statute that covers racially motivated crime, however, does not carry the death 
penalty, which accounts for some of the additional charges. The trial, with its 
attendant expense and emotional trauma, Bruck intimated, was purely a function 
of the government's desire to pursue the death penalty.

Shortly after 1 o'clock, Richardson called the 1st witness: Felicia Sanders, a 
longtime member of Emanuel. She escaped harm that night, only to witness the 
death of her son, Tywanza, a 26-year-old poet, barber, and musician, who had 
planned to start graduate school in the fall. Felicia Sanders is 59, with 
deep-brown skin and shoulder-length brown hair, and that day she wore a 
floral-patterned dress with a purple cardigan. She owned - and, until the 
shooting, had operated - a local salon, where her son had grown up amid a hive 
of conversation, jokes, and gossip. She speaks with a pronounced Charleston 
accent, and when Richardson asked her if she was married she looked at her 
husband, sitting in the front row, and answered "Yes" so wearily that the 
courtroom erupted into laughter.

Then Richardson asked her about Roof's behavior in the church. "Most of the 
time, he hung his head down just the way he's doing right now," she said. 
Tywanza was an avid social-media user, and he uploaded a video of himself at 
the church to Snapchat. Roof can be seen in the background, sitting in the 
Bible circle. "He was there for 45 minutes to an hour," Sanders continued. "We 
stood up and shut our eyes to say a prayer." When she heard the first shots, 
she assumed that the noise stemmed from a problem with a new elevator that was 
being installed, but then she looked at the defendant. "I screamed, 'He has a 
gun!'" she said. "By then, he had already shot Reverend Pinckney."

Roof began firing randomly. At one point, he paused to ask Polly Sheppard, a 
72-year-old retired nurse, if he had shot her yet. "My son rised up to get the 
attention off Miss Polly, even though he had already got shot," Sanders told 
the jury. "He stood up and said, 'Why are you doing this?'" She continued, "The 
defendant, over there with his head hanging down, refusing to look at me right 
now, told my son, 'I have to do this, because you're raping our women and y'all 
taking over the world.'" She added, "That's when he put about 5 bullets in my 
son." Sanders lay on the floor, shielding her 11-year-old granddaughter, 
holding the girl so tightly that she worried that she might smother her.

She went on, "I said, 'Tywanza, please lay down.' He said, 'I gotta get to Aunt 
Susie.'" Susie Jackson, who was 87, was the family matriarch, Tywanza's 
great-aunt on his father's side. She had been shot, but Tywanza managed to 
crawl over to her, and reached out to touch her hair, before he died. Sanders 
began to sob as she recalled her son's final moments. She'd had a difficult 
pregnancy with him - the doctors warned that she might miscarry - and she had 
always thought of his birth as a testament to faith. She had come to think of 
his death in similar terms. Sanders told the court, "I watched my son come into 
this world and I watched my son leave this world."

The family members sat quietly throughout most of the trial, but Sanders's 
words left several of them weeping. The sign-language interpreters who relayed 
the proceedings to Gary Washington, whose mother, Ethel Lance, was among the 
dead, were crying. The courtroom sketch artist and many of the journalists 
present paused to wipe away tears. Judge Gergel called a short recess.

When the court reconvened, Bruck, during his cross-examination of Sanders, 
asked if Roof had said anything as he left the church. "Yes," she replied. "He 
said he was going to kill himself, and I was counting on that. He's evil. 
There's no place on earth for him except the pit of Hell."

Dylann Roof, in writings found during a search of his prison cell, imagined 
himself the last stalwart of the Lost Cause of the Confederacy. He wrote that 
"segregation was not a bad thing. It was mostly defensive." (When investigators 
asked where he got his information, he said, "It's all there on the Internet." 
He had found the Council of Conservative Citizens Web site, which descended 
from the old White Citizens Councils.) The Civil War began in Charleston. The 
Ordinance of Secession was signed in Institute Hall, on Meeting Street, in 
December, 1860; the first shots were fired at Fort Sumter, in the harbor, a few 
months later. The reaction of many Charlestonians to the extraordinary moment, 
at a bond hearing the day after Roof's arrest, when, one by one, family members 
stood and forgave him, was an outgrowth of the city's relationship to that 
past. Forgiveness was not just an example of how to metabolize hatred directed 
at you, or just a demonstration of Christian faith, though it was both of those 
things. It stood for a broader redemption, an exoneration from history itself.

One afternoon during the trial, I visited the Confederate Museum, in Market 
Hall, on Meeting Street. The hall was built in 1841, and served as the 
headquarters of a market where, the museum's Web site states, "fruits, meats, 
vegetables, and fish were sold - no slaves." In 1899, the Daughters of the 
Confederacy opened the museum in a large room on the 2nd floor. Glass cases 
display Confederate uniforms, swords, volumes of the military registries of the 
Confederate States of America, and aged histories of the conflict. Chunks of 
shrapnel from the Union's assault on the city rest on shelves. A South Carolina 
secession flag dominates the center of the room.

One of the docents, a red-haired woman in her 40s, introduced herself as Jill. 
She wore an orange Clemson University sweater, in honor of its football team, 
which had clinched the national championship the night before. I told her that 
I was in town for the Roof trial, and she said, "He's just a crazy nut," adding 
that the jury shouldn't need to deliberate long before passing a death 
sentence. Another docent, Barbara, who belongs to a Methodist church near 
Emanuel, said that she'd been deeply moved by the victims' families: "I was 
blown away by their faith. It was completely unshakable." When I asked the 2 
women if it was possible to interpret Roof's motives as an extension of the 
Confederate cause, they both demurred. "We can't control how crazy racists use 
the symbols," Jill said. "What he's doing isn't connected to anything to do 
with our heritage," Barbara added. A man visiting the museum agreed, saying 
that Roof did not understand the Confederacy and had merely retrofitted it to 
his terrible world view.

During the recent battles over the appropriateness of flying the Confederate 
flag from public buildings, some Southerners rallied around the phrase 
"heritage, not hate." At the museum, it occurred to me that this act of 
distancing was what Roof most fiercely rejected. Charleston today is a 
testament to the successful paring of hate from heritage. Herb Frazier, a black 
journalist who grew up in the city and has attended Emanuel since childhood, 
told me that black Charlestonians have always hated the Calhoun monument. "He 
looks down with this scowl on his face," he said. Then, in 1999, Charleston's 
Holocaust Memorial was erected just 50 feet from the base of Calhoun's column. 
That proximity suggests either a wishful denial of Calhoun's legacy or a level 
of irony not typically found among municipal planners.

Last year, Frazier collaborated with Marjory Wentworth, South Carolina's poet 
laureate, and Bernard Powers, a professor of history at the College of 
Charleston, on "We Are Charleston," a book that puts the church murders in the 
context of the city's racial history and records the responses to it. A week 
after the shooting, following a vote in the legislature, Governor Haley called 
for the removal of the Confederate flag that had flown at the State House since 
1961, an act that was widely praised. But Wentworth pointed out that the 
decision was at least partly pragmatic. "We've been boycotted ever since it 
went up," she said. "You don't read much about that. There were a lot of 
business leaders that wanted it down." It was a recognition not altogether 
distinct from the one that Strom Thurmond may have reached 68 years earlier: 
that racism, at least in its most overt forms, is bad for business.

But for Roof and the fraternity that he sought out on Web sites like 
Stormfront, where he operated under the user name LilAryan, this paring was a 
contradictory undertaking. What is the point, he seemed to reason, of 
commemorating the Confederacy if you ignore the reason that it existed in the 
first place?

The 2nd day of the trial began with a debate between the defense and the 
prosecution about the velocity with which Roof's soul might arrive in Hell. 
Bruck had filed a motion for a mistrial, arguing that the jury might construe 
Sanders's statement that "there's no place on earth for him" as a plea for the 
death penalty. Richardson objected. "She was not commenting on the punishment," 
he said, but rather on where Roof would have gone if he killed himself. He 
added, "That is also where he's going if he dies of natural causes or the state 
does it."

For many people in Charleston, being asked to decide whether Roof should be 
executed amounted to what older Southern blacks refer to as being "put in a 
trickbag": a circumstance in which there are no good options and one must 
reconcile with the bad ones. It had been noted that the family members and the 
congregation were averse to having Roof put to death, but they were not 
unanimous in their views. Eric Manning, the pastor, told me that the A.M.E. 
church opposes the death penalty: "We are called to be the light of the world, 
so life is sacred." Carey Grady, a senior pastor at Reid Chapel A.M.E. Church, 
in Columbia, had known Pinckney from childhood. The 2 friends kept in touch 
regularly, and often texted. Grady showed me the message he sent Pinckney when 
he first heard about the shooting. "I know you're getting dozens of calls right 
now," it says. "You and the Emanuel Church family are in our prayers." 
Pinckney, Grady said, almost to himself, "never replied." The criminal-justice 
system was unfair to African-Americans, Grady told me, then added, "I hate to 
say it, but, if the system is unjust, the most just thing to happen in that 
system is for Roof to get the death penalty, because otherwise you make the 
statement that black lives really don't matter."

Malcolm Graham is the youngest brother of Cynthia Hurd, one of the victims. She 
had worked for more than thirty years as a librarian for the public and the 
university systems. Graham, a former state senator from North Carolina, 
recently ran for Congress - something that his sister had encouraged him to do. 
He concurred with Grady: why have the death penalty if it wasn't used in this 
instance? Sharon Risher's mother, Ethel Lance, was a lifelong member of the 
church. She died that night, too, but Risher thought it preferable that Roof 
live out every day of his natural life in full knowledge of what he had done. 
Rose Simmons's father, Daniel, an assistant pastor at the church, was shot when 
he ran to help Clementa Pinckney; he died in the hospital a few hours later. 
Simmons told me that her own views were irrelevant, because Roof had "sentenced 
himself to death by his actions."

Those moral calculations, as with everything else associated with the case, 
were refracted through the lens of race. In a statewide poll, 2/3 of 
African-Americans favored sentencing Roof to life in prison, while 64 % of 
whites believed that the death penalty was warranted. That result mirrored the 
general division between blacks and whites on the issue of capital punishment, 
which is driven, at least in part, by the fact that it has disproportionately 
been used against black defendants. It had to be said that excising Roof's 
presence from the world would change little about black Charlestonians' 
perspective on what happened at the church that night. Their white 
counterparts, meanwhile, were eager to reject Roof's overtures to them. Joe 
Riley, the city's mayor at the time, emphasized that the suspect was not from 
Charleston, a point that Riley's successor, John Tecklenburg, reiterated, as 
did other whites with whom I discussed the trial. If race offered a reluctant 
commonality between Roof and white Charleston, geography provided at least a 
literal distancing.

Then, there was the fact that, during the past 40 years, 81 % of those given 
the death sentence in South Carolina had been convicted of killing white 
victims. A death sentence for Roof would add a patina of fairness to a practice 
steeped in the racial disparities of the criminal-justice system. A life 
sentence, on the other hand, would seem to suggest that, whatever the opaque 
mathematics of race, a black life is worth less than 1/9 of a white one.

For David Bruck, Roof's case represented another chance to address the unjust 
imposition of the death penalty. At certain moments in the trial, though, his 
belief that he could diminish a racist practice by saving the life of a white 
supremacist appeared idealistic to a fault. During his cross-examination of 
Joseph Hamski, the F.B.I.'s lead investigator in the case, Bruck asked, "What 
became of Denmark Vesey?" Vesey, a slave who had bought his freedom and become 
a carpenter, was the lead plotter of the 1822 revolt at the church. "He was 
hung," Hamski replied. Bruck was suggesting that the death penalty is 
irrevocably tainted by racism, but he had seemed to equate Vesey, a man who was 
prepared to kill for the cause of black freedom, with Roof, a man who had 
killed because he thought that blacks were too free. The families murmured 
uneasily at the comparison.

The abstract morality of the sentencing contrasted with the concrete 
particulars of the crime, which were presented on the second day of the trial. 
Brittany Burke, who had served as an agent with the South Carolina Law 
Enforcement Division, testified that 74 shell casings had been recovered from 
the scene, and that 54 bullets had been removed from the 9 bodies. Clementa 
Pinckney was shot 3 times; Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, a dynamic young preacher 
at the church, was shot 5 times. DePayne Middleton-Doctor, a minister and an 
admissions coordinator at a local learning center, was shot 8 times; Cynthia 
Hurd, 6 times. Tywanza Sanders was shot 4 times; Ethel Lance, seven; Myra 
Thompson, who had received her preaching certificate that evening and was 
excited about leading Bible study for the 1st time, 8 times. Daniel Simmons was 
shot 4 times. Susie Jackson, the oldest of the victims, was shot 11 times.

Judge Gergel had suggested that the family members give strong consideration to 
whether they would return to the courtroom after the morning recess. The 
prosecution was going to walk the jury through the shooting, with photographs 
of the crime scene, and there was no shame in wanting to avoid that spectacle. 
But the families returned, escorted by 2 court-appointed advocates, who were 
there to offer support. The photographs showed a spacious room, with a small 
altar and several round tables and chairs, as if in preparation for a 
reception. A bulletin board read, in large red letters, "2015 Congrats Grads!" 
A Bible rested undisturbed on 1 of the tables, but most of the furniture was 
riddled with gunfire. The dead lay in an obscene array about the room. Many in 
the courtroom wept, again, at that sight.

I watched Roof during the prosecution's presentation, and it seemed possible 
that he had not fully realized the extent of his actions prior to that moment. 
In his confession, when the police officers asked him how many people he had 
shot, he said, "If I was gonna guess, 5," and he appeared surprised to learn 
that he had actually killed nine. But, in the courtroom, he sat impassively - 
as he did throughout the trial - his response to the atrocities as inscrutable 
as his capacity to have committed them in the first place.

On December 15th, when it was time for Bruck to present his closing argument, 
he stood facing the jury with his hands clasped behind his back. He described 
Roof as "really a boy, who gives his whole life over to a belief that there is 
raging in our society a fight to the death between black people and white 
people that is being concealed and covered up by some sort of vast conspiracy." 
Bruck added, "He doesn't seem to think that anybody but him really understands 
this."

Bruck pointed out that Roof had no escape plan. He used 7 clips of ammunition 
during the attack, but kept the 8th with him as he departed, planning, as he 
said in the church and also during his confession, to kill himself if escape 
proved impossible. When he was arrested, the day after the shooting, in Shelby, 
North Carolina, he had been driving toward Nashville. When the police asked him 
why, he replied, "Why not? I've never been to Nashville." Because Roof had 
refused to have his mental-health history discussed, Bruck was left to portray 
him as an alienated young man, not fully capable of distinguishing between the 
real world and the hyperbolic paranoid clamor that he found on the Internet.

Bruck's emphasis on Roof's age wasn't entirely lost on the court. Andy Savage, 
the lawyer who represented several of the families in a separate lawsuit 
against the federal government, for allowing Roof to purchase a firearm despite 
a drug arrest - and who had also, incidentally, represented Officer Michael 
Slager in his trial - told me that the families initially suspected that Roof 
hadn't acted alone. "That changed after watching the confession," Savage said. 
Roof was not the product of sinister manipulation: his biggest complaint was 
his inability to find like-minded patriots - he dismissed other white 
nationalists as being all talk. He was, instead, a prodigy of hate.

The jurors withdrew just after 1 o'clock. That afternoon, Roof was convicted of 
all 33 charges. Felicia Sanders nodded silently each time Judge Gergel uttered 
the word "guilty."

The court recessed until the new year, when the penalty phase of the trial 
started. Roof was representing himself again, and, as his defense sat nearby, 
he offered a disjointed opening statement, in which he told the jurors that he 
would not lie to them, reiterating that "there was nothing wrong with me 
psychologically," and asked them to ignore everything that they had previously 
heard from the defense. He spoke for barely 3 minutes. He called no witnesses 
and offered no evidence.

During the next few days, Richardson called 23 witnesses to attest to the 
character of the victims and to the impact of their deaths. The first of them, 
Jennifer Pinckney, the widow of the pastor, spoke for nearly 3 hours about the 
life they had shared since meeting as college students. Anthony Thompson talked 
about the strength of the bond between him and his wife, Myra; he sighed as he 
looked at their wedding photograph, still awed by her beauty. "She was the one 
I prayed for," he told the court. At Judge Gergel's prodding, Richardson had 
the subsequent witnesses testify for shorter periods. But nearly all of them 
brought photographs of their loved ones, each of which had to be approved by 
the defense, which, in this case, was the defendant. The testimonies became a 
surreal processional, in which Roof became privy to the personal achievements 
and intimate family moments of the deceased. Killing the nine people was one 
crime. Being allowed to posthumously get to know them seemed an altogether 
different one.

On the afternoon of January 10th, the prosecution rested, and Roof made a brief 
closing statement, in which he said, "I felt like I had to do it. I still feel 
like I had to do it." The jurors withdrew to deliberate. They did not, in fact, 
need long. When the court reconvened, just 3 hours later, they recommended the 
death penalty for Roof. Gergel thanked the jurors for their service and 
dismissed them. The next day, he allowed those family members who had not yet 
had a chance to deliver their statements to address the court; most of the 
jurors returned to hear them. Gary Washington, through his sign-language 
interpreters, told of a sense of foreboding that had hung over him on the day 
of the shooting, and how he had anxiously tried to reach his mother that night. 
The news of her death hit him so hard that he had to be hospitalized. "You 
don't know anything about us," he said to Roof. "You don't know anything about 
who we are."

Cynthia Hurd's brother Melvin Graham, a retired laboratory technician, also 
spoke. He is taller and thinner than Malcolm Graham, but he has the same 
features and the same note of sadness in his eyes. In the tone of a man who had 
marshalled the entirety of his will toward self-control, Melvin told Roof, "You 
tried to kill my sister, but you failed." Instead, Roof had immortalized her. 
As a librarian, she had helped generations of students and readers, and her 
death had spurred an outpouring of recognition for that work: "the Cynthia 
Graham Hurd Fellowship, University of South Carolina; the Cynthia Graham Hurd 
St. Andrews Regional Library, Charleston, South Carolina; the Cynthia Graham 
Hurd Memorial Scholarship, College of Charleston." Graham named nearly a dozen 
such tributes. "And that's just what I could remember off the top of my head," 
he said. The stories served to remind the court of what had been lost, but they 
also must have reassured Roof that these were indeed the type of blameless, 
decent people whom he said he had set out to hurt.

Judge Gergel then turned to the final sentencing. "This trial has produced no 
winners, only losers," he said. "This proceeding cannot give the families what 
they truly want, the return of their loved ones." He sentenced Roof to death 18 
times, and handed down an additional 15 life sentences, for the hate crimes and 
other charges. It took Gergel 10 minutes to read the entire sentence. Roof then 
stood and requested new counsel to handle an appeal. When Gergel asked him on 
what basis he was making the request, Roof smirked and said of Bruck, "I just 
don't trust him." The request was denied.

The State of South Carolina is also due to try Roof, but that trial has been 
postponed indefinitely. Last summer, Scarlett Wilson, the local State 
Solicitor, balked at the federal trial's taking precedence over the state 
prosecution, noting that the federal government hadn't carried out an execution 
since 2003. The fate of Dylann Roof will likely wind through thickets of legal 
appeals and an equally onerous state trial before it is ultimately resolved.

The day after the sentencing, I flew to San Francisco. As I checked into a 
hotel, I made small talk with the bellman, Aaron Thames, an African-American in 
his early 40s. I asked if he was a native of the Bay Area, and he replied, "No, 
I'm originally from Charleston, South Carolina." When I told him that I'd just 
come from the Roof trial, he looked stricken. He said, "My family knew Reverend 
Pinckney and Cynthia Hurd since I was a child. Miss Cynthia is one of my 
mother's oldest friends, and when we would visit the library she would always 
have books set aside for me and my brother to read."

I had flown almost as far from South Carolina as I could get without leaving 
the continental United States, but had encountered the consequences of Roof's 
crime in the transparent grief of the 1st person I'd spoken with in a new city. 
The immensity of the pain that Roof has inflicted upon Charleston is not 
contained by geography. It conforms perfectly to the contours of the nation 
that produced him.

(source: Jelani Cobb, The New Yorker)