CHARLESTON, S.C. (WCBD) – The U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals says a previous death sentence against Charleston Church Shooter, Dylann Roof, will not be overturned.
Roof filed his appeal back in 2017, a year after he was sentenced to death row in the killing of nine churchgoers during a Bible study massacre.
Roof, who was 21 at the time of the shooting, was convicted of 33 felony counts in the Emanuel AME Shooting on June 17, 2015.
But earlier this year, his attorneys argued that the sentence and conviction should be overturned because Roof was not competent enough to represent himself during the original trial.
However, before he stood trial in 2016, Roof appeared at two competency hearings. During both, a judge found him to be competent for trial. But his attorneys said reports detailing his apparent mental illness weren’t taken into consideration.
Reports from doctors and psychologists created after the massacre outline Roof’s history with mental illness. During the time of the crime and the trial, Roof was reportedly suffering from delusions, paranoia, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), and more. In Tuesday’s arguments, his defense team states that the reports were not weighed as heavily as they should have been during Roof’s competency hearings.
“These are all part of what makes him incompetent. So, it’s not just a delusion, it’s not paranoia, it’s not OCD, it’s not all these things, it’s the full picture,” said Sapna Mirchandani, one of Roof’s attorneys.
Roof represented himself at his 2016 trial after he reportedly dismissed his team of attorneys because they wanted to use mental illness as a defense. Roof claimed he was not mentally ill, and he wanted to keep those comments out of the courtroom.
During an appeal hearing on Wednesday, the court affirmed the original sentence saying, “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 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals went on to say, “we have reached that conclusion not as a product of emotion but through a thorough analytical process, which we have endeavored to detail here. In this, we have followed the example of the trial judge, who managed this difficult case with skill and compassion for all concerned, including Roof himself. For the reasons given, we will affirm.”
No other court date is set.
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