COLUMBIA, S.C. — Defense lawyers will advance arguments Tuesday on up to 20 issues in the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia, as to why Dylann Roof was wrongfully convicted and sentenced to the death penalty in 2017 after a weekslong trial. They will ask the court to vacate both the conviction and the death penalty.
Those arguments will be countered by a team of prosecution appellate lawyers from the U.S. Department of Justice. They seek to uphold the conviction and sentence.
Roof, 27, who grew up in Columbia, was sentenced to death in January 2017 by U.S. Judge Richard Gergel after a jury found him guilty of 18 death-eligible federal hate crimes and firearms charges in the Charleston church shooting. In a subsequent proceeding to determine sentence, the same jury ruled Roof deserved the death penalty. Gergel then pronounced the sentence.
Roof showed no remorse and permitted his defense team to offer only scant rebuttal to the prosecution’s charges.
Evidence at Roof’s trial, which included his own writings and selfie photos and videos, portrayed him as a self-described white supremacist who wanted to start a race war by killing African Americans. To implement his plan, Roof traveled to Charleston in June 2015, entered a prayer meeting at an African American church and executed nine Black churchgoers, including beloved Democratic state Sen. Clementa Pinckney.
“Multiple issues arising from convictions for hate crime, religious obstruction, and firearms offenses resulting in death and from imposition of death penalty” will be considered, according to a description about the case on the 4th Circuit’s website.
Roof’s purported mental illness and inability to be his own lawyer — casting aside an active defense role by David Bruck, one of the nation’s most experienced death penalty lawyers — is a major feature of Roof’s defense.
“When Dylann Roof represented himself at his capital trial, he was a 22-year-old, ninth-grade dropout diagnosed with schizophrenia spectrum disorder, autism, anxiety and depression, who believed his sentence didn’t matter because white nationalists would free him from prison after an impending race war,” defense lawyers say in their 347-page brief to the 4th Circuit.
“His experienced counsel (Bruck and his defense team), whom Roof jettisoned to prevent evidence of his mental illness from coming to light, told the court that in their decades of experience, none had represented a defendant so disconnected from reality. And yet, the court (Judge Richard Gergel) allowed Roof not only to stand trial, but to represent himself and present no mitigating evidence or argument to the jury.
“Though Roof’s mental state was the subject of two competency hearings, and five experts found him delusional — findings swiftly dismissed by the court, in its rush to move the case along — jurors never heard any of that evidence. Instead, prosecutors told them Roof was a calculated killer with no signs of mental illness. Given no reason to do otherwise, jurors sentenced Roof to death. Roof’s crime was tragic, but this Court (the 4th Circuit) can have no confidence in the jury’s verdict,” the defense brief on the case says.
Prosecutors will argue that Gergel’s rulings in both the guilt or innocence, as well as the penalty phases of the trial, were correct.
“(Judge Gergel) did not clearly err in finding Roof competent to stand trial. The finding was supported by expert testimony and was not arbitrary or unwarranted,” the prosecutors’ brief said. “Roof’s right to self-representation was correctly defined and properly protected.”
“No error occurred at the penalty phase,” the prosecutors wrote. “The death penalty was not plainly erroneous based on Roof’s age or mental condition. Finally, Roof’s convictions rest on sound legal and constitutional grounds.”
Arguments before a three-judge panel are to begin Tuesday morning. Ninety minutes will be allotted for each side. The public will be able to listen in on a live audio feed.
Roof is now on federal death row at a high-security penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana.
The judges on the panel are Judge Duane Burton of the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals; Kent Jordan of the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals; and Senior Judge Ronald Gilman of the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals.
Usually, judges on a panel are chosen from the full 4th Circuit, which has 15 judges. However, 4th Circuit Judge Jay Richardson of Columbia was in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in South Carolina in 2017 and the lead prosecutor on the Roof case.
Lawyers for Roof are Sapna Mirchandani of the federal public defender’s office in Maryland, Margaret Farrand of the federal public defender’s office in California’s Central District and Alexandra Yates, a court-appointed defense attorney.
They will be opposed by Department of Justice attorneys Ann O’Connell Adams of the department’s Criminal Division and Bonnie Robin-Vergeer of the Civil Rights Division.
Besides Clementa Pinckney, Roof killed eight other parishioners of Mother Emanuel AME Church: The Rev. Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, Cynthia Hurd, Susie Jackson, Ethel Lee Lance, Reverend DePayne Middleton-Doctor, Tywanza Sanders, the Rev. Daniel Simmons Sr. and the Rev. Myra Thompson.
