RICHMOND, VA -- After some three hours of arguments on whether Charleston church killer Dylann Roof should have his death sentence overturned and get a new trial, a three-judge U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals panel in Richmond adjourned Tuesday afternoon without making any decision.
Nor did the judges hint when they might render a decision, after a hearing that touched on nuanced questions concerning Roof’s mental fitness, the decision-making of trial Judge Richard Gergel, Roof’s future danger to others if allowed a life sentence, states’ rights, the reach of the Interstate Commerce Clause, the difference between “harmless error” and “reversible error” and numerous other complex legal issues.
The judges could uphold or overturn both the conviction and sentence, or they could let the conviction stand and send the case back to the trial court to revisit the sentence issue.
In one key issue — whether trial Judge Gergel was correct in limiting evidence of Roof’s lack of mental fitness — Roof attorney Sapna Mirchandani told the judges that Gergel had committed “an abuse of discretion.”
Defense briefs argue that Roof was seriously mentally ill, incapable of participating in his defense and that Gergel had wrongly given too much weight to the prosecution’s psychiatric evaluations of Roof in finding he was fit to direct his own defense.
“We ask the court to remedy that error by vacating the death sentence and remanding his case to the district court for a retrospective competency hearing,” Mirchandani told the judges.
But government attorney Ann Adams told the judges that “ample evidence” supports Gergel’s ruling that Roof was competent to stand trial, and the judge had acted properly in restricting mental fitness evidence the defense had tried to get before the jury.
“Roof had a rational and factual understanding of the nature and consequences of the proceedings against him,” Adams told the judges. “The district court noted his high I.Q., his ability to describe the proceedings in detail and .... understand the proceedings.”
Roof, 27, a self-described white supremacist, was sentenced to death in January 2017 by U.S. Judge Richard Gergel after a jury found him guilty of death eligible federal hate-crimes and firearms charges in connection with the 2015 killings of nine African Americans at a downtown Charleston church during a prayer meeting.
In a subsequent proceeding to determine his sentence, the same jury ruled Roof deserved the death penalty. Judge Gergel then pronounced the sentence.
Roof, who grew up in Columbia, said he wanted to start a race war by killing African Americans, according to evidence at his trial which included a video confession to FBI agents and a manifesto he published online.
In June 2015, to implement his plan, Roof traveled to Charleston, entered a prayer meeting at an African American church and executed nine Black churchgoers, including beloved Democratic state Sen. Clementa Pinckney.
The crime attracted worldwide attention and caused the S.C. General Assembly to vote to take the Confederate flag — a symbol used by Roof in a number of photographs found among his possessions — off State House grounds.
At Tuesday’s hearing, Roof attorney Mirchandani told the judges that Judge Gergel’s “clear error” was not paying any attention to psychiatric and psychological evidence by five experts developed by Roof’s trial defense attorneys that showed their client was “clearly delusional” at the time of the trial.
Just before his trial began in December 2016, Roof “had gotten wind” that his defense attorneys were planning on introducing testimony about his mental illness at trial, Mirchandani said.
But Roof, who wanted to be idolized by white supremacists for his plans to start a race war, believed that being labeled as mentally ill would “thwart his rescue by white nationalists and at that point he started covering up all the delusions he had previously spoken about,” Mirchandani said. “He emphatically believed he would be rescued after the race war.”
One judge interrupted, asking Mirchandani, “Does that make him somebody not competent to stand trial? It certainly indicates he’s a person who is full of hate. And certainly indicates he’s a person who is horribly motivated. Is having despicable opinions and forecasts the same thing as incompetency in the legal sense to stand trial?”
Mirchandani replied, “It is not his opinion. It is a delusion. A delusion by definition is a fixed false belief that cannot be moved by objective contrary evidence.”
A break between Roof and his trial legal defense team, headed by nation death penalty expert David Bruck, happened during the penalty phase of the trial when his lawyers wanted to present mental evidence they hoped would show the jury Roof had “a lifetime” of mental impairment and shouldn’t get the death penalty, Mirchandani said.
In another issue, Roof attorney Alexandra Yates told the judges that Judge Gergel had been wrong to exclude evidence showing that Roof could be confined safely, with no danger to others, if given life sentences.
At trial, prosecutors argued that Roof, if given life sentences, could still try to start a race war by sending mail to people outside the prison.
As the jury deliberated whether Roof should live or die, its members at different times posed three questions to Judge Gergel, and two of those questions concerned whether Roof would be a “future danger” to others, Yates said. But Gergel chose not to answer those questions, she said.
“The judge refused to clear away this confusion,” she said. “(This) deprived Mr. Roof of a fair penalty phase.”
Tuesday’s appellate hearing was far more complex than a normal trial, during which competing story lines in everyday language about guilt or innocence often grab a jury’s attention. Both the judges and the lawyers repeatedly referred to numerous other appellate court rulings, cited doctrines such as “law of the case” (meaning lower courts are bound by higher courts’ rulings) and, for good measure, sprinkled in a few Latin terms such as “actus reus,” a phrase that means “the guilty act.”
In April 2017, three months after being condemned to death by a federal jury, Roof pleaded guilty to nine state counts of murder and was sentenced to nine consecutive life sentences. The guilty plea and sentences in state court, which will stand no matter what happens to his federal conviction and death sentence, spared the families of the victims the ordeal of another trial.
Roof is now on federal death row at a high-security federal prison 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.
Source: charlotteobserver.com, John Monk, May 25, 2021. John Monk has covered courts, crime, politics, public corruption, the environment and other issues in the Carolinas for more than 40 years. A U.S. Army veteran who covered the 1989 American invasion of Panama, Monk is a former Washington correspondent for The Charlotte Observer. He has covered numerous death penalty trials, including those of the Charleston church killer, Dylann Roof, serial killer Pee Wee Gaskins and child killer Tim Jones. Monk’s hobbies include hiking, books, languages, music and a lot of other things.
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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde
