US prosecutors seek death for shooter in racist murders

WASHINGTON: Federal prosecutors said Friday they will seek the death penalty for a man convicted in the racially motivated murders of 10 Black people in a New York supermarket in 2022. The move was a first for the administration of Democratic President Joe Biden, who is running for re-election in November and who pledged during his 2020 campaign to work towards abolishing capital punishment at the federal level. White supremacist Payton Gendron, 19, was sentenced to life in prison in February 2023 by a court in the state of New York after pleading guilty to racially motivated murders and acts of terrorism.

In the federal case against him for hate crimes, prosecutors said the intentional and premeditated nature of the killings, as well as its racist motivations, justified the death penalty. “Payton Gendron expressed bias, hatred, and contempt toward Black persons and his animus toward Black persons played a role in the killings,” the Justice Department said in a statement.

Since the start of Biden’s presidency, the Justice Department has only sought the death penalty twice, but those were proceedings initiated under his Republican predecessor Donald Trump. Attorney General Merrick Garland also decreed a moratorium on federal executions in May 2021. Federal executions in the United States are rare, with the last taking place in January 2021. US states carried out 24 executions in 2023, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

Gendron planned the attack for months, targeting Tops Friendly Market in Buffalo, near the Canadian border, because of the surrounding neighborhood’s large African-American population. On May 14, 2022 the then-18-year-old drove from his hometown of Conklin, more than 200 miles (322 kilometers) away, with the intention of killing as many Black people as possible, prosecutors said. Wearing heavy body armor and wielding an AR-15 assault rifle, he shot four people in the parking lot, three fatally, before entering the grocery store. Gendron wore a helmet with a video camera attached and live-streamed the two-minute attack on the platform Twitch. Police arrested Gendron within hours of the attack and investigators found a 180-page document on his computer laying out his racist motivations for the massacre.