COLUMBIA, S.C. — The federal government will pay a total of $88 million to settle a case brought by the survivors of the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church shooting in Charleston and families of the nine victims murdered by a white supremacist in 2015.
The individual settlements for all the shooting victims were filed Thursday in the U.S. District Court in Columbia. It was approved by the U.S. Department of Justice. The agreement still must be finalized.
“For those killed in the shooting, the settlements range from $6 million to $7.5 million per claimant,” the DOJ said. “For the (five) survivors, the settlements are for $5 million per claimant.”
The victims of the Mother Emanuel AME Church massacre were pastor and state Sen. Clementa Pinckney, the Rev. Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, Cynthia Hurd, Susie Jackson, Ethel Lance, the Rev. DePayne Middleton-Doctor, Tywanza Sanders, the Rev. Daniel L. Simmons Sr. and Myra Thompson.
“You can all take the settlement. Bring my husband back to me,” Jennifer Pinckney, Clementa’s wife, said in Washington on Thursday. “Bring their father back to them.”
Five years in the making, the settlement arose out of lawsuits filed by victims and their families in the wake of the June 2015 murders at the historic Mother Emanuel Church in downtown Charleston. The convicted shooter, Dylann Roof, was sentenced to death in federal court in January 2017. Roof’s motive in killing the nine Black churchgoers, shot to death during an evening prayer meeting, was to start a race war, according to evidence presented at his trial.
A federal appeals court upheld Roof’s conviction and death sentence this summer.
The lawsuits alleged that the FBI, which had a duty to perform background checks on handgun buyers, was negligent when the agency performed a background check on Roof, who had just turned 21.
Under federal law, gun buyers must undergo a computer background check at the federally licensed firearm dealer.
Roof was able to buy a gun because of what critics call a weakness in the law — the so-called “Charleston loophole” — to buy the .45 caliber Glock handgun that he used to kill all nine with money he received from his father for his 21st birthday, evidence in the case said.
Under that law, gun sellers can sell firearms to a buyer after three days regardless of whether the FBI’s background check has been completed. If a person faces criminal charges, the gun store must deny the buyer that purchase.
In Roof’s case, he was facing a drug charge, but the FBI failed to discover that in its search of police databases.
After three days, the gun store sold Roof the gun.
As part of the the settlement announced Thursday, the Justice Department admitted no fault.
Dozens of attorneys, many from South Carolina, participated in settling the case. Judge Margaret Seymour presided.
“These victims were the best of us,” said Bakari Sellers, an attorney for the victims, who spoke from Washington on Thursday standing beside family members, survivors and two state senators. “The settlement represents one of the largest settlements in a collection of civil rights cases in the nation’s history.”
The $88 million figure is important beyond its high amount, Sellers said. It represents, he said, a number special to white supremacists because the letter H, referring to Adolf Hitler, is the eighth letter of the alphabet.
Roof wore shoes with the No. 88 on them, Sellers said.
So, Sellers added, the settlement is a rebuke to “the white supremacists and racists in this country by saying we are taking this tragedy that they tried to tear this country apart with and build Black communities and generational wealth.”
Sellers also praised Attorney General Merrick Garland and President Joe Biden for making the agreement possible and called attention to senselessness of the killings.
“The settlement doesn’t do anything to change or alter the existing landscape” of gun sales and background checks, Mullins McLeod, a Charleston attorney who helped litigate the Emanuel victims’ lawsuits, said in Washington on Thursday.
“But what it does do is, I think it shares with everyone how significant and important a job the FBI understands their role is and how well of a job they do,” he said.
The victims’ family members and survivors spoke Wednesday, including Pinckney’s daughters.
“It’s already so hard to lose someone you love, but it’s even harder to grow up without a father knowing that he lost his life in a place that he devoted his entire life to,” said Eliana Pinckney, the eldest daughter.
The lawsuits filed by the victims’ families were at first dismissed by a lower federal court in South Carolina. The government had claimed immunity from such lawsuits. But, in August 2019, the plaintiffs won a major victory when a majority of a three-judge panel for the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reinstated the lawsuits and ruled they could go forward.
The panel ruled that the government did not have immunity because the law required the FBI to carry out a thorough background check, but it did not do so. The case went to mediation, which concluded Thursday with the announcement of the settlement.
A key legal issue in the case, which affected the government’s claim of immunity, was whether the FBI employee who performed Roof’s background check was required by law to carry out that search, or whether the search was discretionary.
Attorney William Wilkins, who argued the case before the 4th Circuit panel, told the judges that the FBI employee’s duty was not optional — it was mandatory to do a thorough background check.
Evidence in the case clearly showed the examiner had failed to do a thorough check, Wilkins told The State on Thursday.
Had the examiner done a thorough check, they would have found Roof’s criminal charge and sent a message to the gun store that the purchase should be denied, Wilkins said. The examiner had information that Roof had been arrested and was told the Columbia Police Department had the information on that arrest, but “she took no action,” Wilkins said.
“A failure of the government to complete the gun check in three days is in effect a permission to the gun dealer to go ahead and complete the transaction (the sale),” Wilkins said.
The “loophole” was disclosed in the weeks following the June 2015 shootings.
Then, former FBI Director James Comey issued a public statement explaining that Roof was prohibited under federal law from possessing a firearm when he bought the the Glock .45 semiautomatic pistol he used in the attacks only because of lapses in the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System.
“Dylann Roof, the alleged killer of so many innocent people at the Emanuel AME church, should not have been allowed to purchase the gun he allegedly used that evening,” Comey said in his 2015 statement.
Attempts to close the loophole have so far been unsuccessful and stalled in Washington.
In its statement Thursday, the DOJ said since the Charleston shootings the federal agency has “worked to strengthen and improve the background check process. The department and FBI are also actively working to combat gun violence, which is a significant aspect of the department’s comprehensive violent crime reduction strategy.”
The lawyers who represented the victims are Sellers, Mullins McLeod, Gedney Howe III, William Wilkins, Randall Hood, Carl Pierce, Richard Gergel, Andy Savage, Allan Sloan and Steve Schmutz. They also include three state Democratic state senators — Sen. Dick Harpootlian of Richland County, Sen. Gerald Malloy of Darlington County and Sen. Ronnie Sabb of Williamsburg County.
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