Biden opts not to commute death sentences of AME Church shooter Dylann Roof, 2 others
President Joe Biden has opted not to commute the death sentence for Dylann Roof, who murdered nine members of a historically black church during a Bible study, and two others.
The Biden administration announced Monday that the president was commuting the death sentences of 37 individuals in federal prison, changing their sentences to life in prison with no possibility of parole.
The announcement noted that Biden “believes that America must stop the use of the death penalty at the federal level” except when the conviction involves “terrorism and hate-motivated mass murder.”
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Roof, who in June 2015 entered Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, during a Wednesday Bible study and killed nine black church members in a failed attempt to start a race war, was not among those given a commuted sentence.
The other two federal death row inmates not given commuted sentences include Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who was responsible for the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, and Robert Bowers, who killed 11 congregants at the Tree of Life Synagogue of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 2018, reported The Associated Press.
In December 2016, a jury found Roof guilty of 33 charges of federal hate crimes resulting in death, obstruction of religion and firearms violations for his shooting at the AME church.
"He must be held accountable for each and every action he took inside that church," said then-Assistant U.S. Attorney Nathan Williams, as quoted by Reuters in 2016. "For every life he took."
The 22-year-old Roof was sentenced to death in January 2017, making him the first person in United States history to be ordered executed for being found guilty of a federal hate crime.
In August 2021, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit issued a per curiam decision upholding his death sentence, saying that no legal record "can capture the full horror of what Roof did."
The appeals court panel had rejected various claims by Roof in his appeal that errors had been made when the court concluded that he was competent to stand trial for the nine murders.
“Roof murdered African Americans at their church, during their Bible study and worship. They had welcomed him. He slaughtered them. He did so with the express intent of terrorizing not just his immediate victims at the historically important Mother Emanuel Church, but as many similar people as would hear of the mass murder,” read the opinion.
“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.”
