(Photo by Grace Beahm-Pool/Getty Images)
No matter your opinion on the death penalty, you’d be hard-pressed to find an example of someone more deserving of it than Dylann Roof, the perpetrator of the Charleston church mass shooting in June 2015.
Today Roof was in fact the recipient of the death penalty by a federal jury as a consequence for the murder of nine people that the white supremacist afterward said he hoped would spur a race war.
The twelve-man jury that included three blacks, who in December found Roof guilty of 33 counts against him, came to a unanimous guilty verdict after about three hours of deliberations.
The guilt of Roof, who openly admitted to committing the shooting and has shown no remorse, was never in doubt. Throughout the trial he used his platform to attempt to justify the murders rather than actively defend himself. That combined with the heinous nature of the crimes meant that the death penalty was always a likely outcome. 18 of the 33 counts against Roof carried a potential death penalty.
Yet the verdict confers no certainty about whether Mr. Roof will ever be put to death at a federal prison in Terre Haute, Ind. His case could spur years of appeals — the courts could well consider his mental competency and even the tearful tenor of the sentencing phase — and the scarcity of lethal injection drugs could hinder his execution.
The federal government has not killed one of its prisoners since 2003. Mr. Roof also faces a separate capital prosecution for murder in South Carolina, where no inmate has been put to death in more than five years. The state trial, initially set for Jan. 17, has been indefinitely postponed.
However, despite the sentence it remains ambiguous if Roof will ever be put to death by the federal government.
Via the New York Times:
Yet the verdict confers no certainty about whether Mr. Roof will ever be put to death at a federal prison in Terre Haute, Ind. His case could spur years of appeals — the courts could well consider his mental competency and even the tearful tenor of the sentencing phase — and the scarcity of lethal injection drugs could hinder his execution.
The federal government has not killed one of its prisoners since 2003. Mr. Roof also faces a separate capital prosecution for murder in South Carolina, where no inmate has been put to death in more than five years. The state trial, initially set for Jan. 17, has been indefinitely postponed.
