Racist Charleston murder: Dylann Roof’s death sentence upheld on appeal

Published on : 08/26/2021 – 00:55

A federal court of appeal confirmed, Wednesday, August 25, the death sentence of the American Dylann Roof, who had coldly killed nine black parishioners of a church in South Carolina in 2015, a massacre which had shocked the planet.

“No clinical summary or in-depth legal analysis can fully account for the atrocity of Roof’s act. His crimes place him under the harshest sentence a just society can deliver,” the judges concluded. of the Richmond Court, in their unanimous judgment.

Convinced of the supremacy of white men over other races he considers inferior, Dylann Roof had opened fire 77 times in a Methodist church in Charleston on June 17, 2015, riddling nine black faithful who had come to welcome him with bullets. with open arms for a Bible study session. The young man was then 21 years old.

Moratorium

This shooting had all the more marked American and international public opinion as it had bloodied a symbolic place of the fight against slavery: the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church brings together the oldest black community in this historic city of the era of the plantations, located in the southeastern United States.

The young extremist was sentenced in early 2017 to the death penalty, without having expressed regret or apologies. Before the Court of Appeal, his lawyers tried to obtain the annulment of his sentence, arguing that the trial judge should never have acceded to the accused’s request to ensure his own defense. But the appellate magistrates swept this argument aside.

The convict, now 27 and held in a penitentiary, is not at risk of execution in the short term, as President Biden’s administration last month imposed a moratorium on federal executions.

With AFP