Dylann Roof sentenced to death

Andrew Bulieris
Sports editor

                By choice of the jury, Dylann Roof has been sentenced to death. He was convicted of killing nine African-American individuals in a church in South Carolina during a bible study he was actually invited to. Roof has openly admitted to massacring the individuals and was guilty on thirty-three counts of the attacks at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. On Tuesday Jan. 10th Dylann Roof was condemned to death. Roof who had said in a closing argument hours earlier that he could ask jurors “to give me a life sentence, but I’m not sure what good that would do,” showed no expression as Judge Richard M. Gergel of Federal District Court announced the verdict. Members of Roof’s family, who have been mostly silent since his arrest, said in a statement on Tuesday that they would “struggle as long as we live to understand why he committed this horrible attack, which caused so much pain to so many good people.” Roof became the first person ever to be sentenced to death for a hate crime.
           During a prayer service at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, Roof killed nine people, all African Americans, including senior pastor and state senator Clementa C. Pinckney, and injured one other person. After several people identified Roof as the main suspect, he became the center of a manhunt that ended the morning after the shooting with his arrest in Shelby, North Carolina. He later confessed that he committed the shooting. In Dec. 2016, Roof was convicted in federal court of all thirty-three federal hate crime charges against him stemming from the shooting; he was sentenced to death for those crimes the following month. Roof is also awaiting trial in South Carolina state court on nine counts of murder, three counts of attempted murder, and possession of a firearm during the commission of a felony. Then this past Tuesday the jury came to a decision to give Roof the death penalty as he now goes and awaits along death row ending the year and a half of the Dylann Roof story.

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