Dylann Roof’s murder conviction and death sentence were upheld by a U.S. appeals court on Wednesday, Aug 25. The racist White supremacist killed nine Black people at a South Carolina church in 2015.
The three-judge panel of the U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals issued the ruling against Roof, who argued that he was not competent to stand trial and represent himself and that the U.S. District Court where he was found guilty abused its discretion.
“No cold record or careful parsing of statutes and precedents can capture the full horror of what Roof did. His crimes qualify him for the harshest penalty that a just society can impose,” the judges wrote in their opinion.
In December 2016, a jury found Roof guilty of 33 federal charges for the mass shooting at the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston in June 2015. The same jury sentenced him to death in January 2017. Roof was the first person in the U.S. sentenced to death for a federal hate crime in 2017. He was 21 at the time he committed the heinous murders.
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