Dylann Roof’s last act
Charleston, S.C. — If Death lingers in courtroom corridors awaiting sentences, this historic city’s federal courthouse was surely a top destination. On Tuesday, the Reaper’s patience was rewarded with the jury’s return of the death penalty for Dylann Roof.
Roof, who insisted on representing himself during the sentencing phase of his 33-count murder trial, was found guilty last month of the slaughter of nine black parishioners at Mother Emanuel A.M.E. Church in June 2015.
Roof’s self-lawyering is still mystifying when he had at his disposal one of the nation’s best death-penalty lawyers, David Bruck, who did represent Roof during the guilt phase that ended last month. Bruck was allowed only to advise Roof during the penalty phase, which began last week, but briefly addressed the judge Tuesday when Roof requested that Bruck address objections.
While the government’s case seemed airtight in covering all the requirements for the death penalty, Roof’s remarks Tuesday took fewer than five minutes.
Wearing slacks and a blue cable-knit sweater — his bowl-cut hair obviously recently shaped — Roof approached the lectern with a single, yellow, letter-sized sheet of paper for his closing argument. Barely audible — and his pauses were longer than his sentences — he made essentially two suggestions seemingly aimed at creating doubt about his alleged hatred of black people and his intent in carrying out his mission, which he himself previously identified as wanting to incite racial violence.
Next, Roof challenged the prosecution’s claim that he’s filled with hatred, one of the statutory-required aggravating factors in capital cases. He referred to his confession when an FBI agent asked him if he hated blacks. Roof’s reply was, “I don’t like what black people do.”
To the jury, he posited: “If I was really filled with as much hate as I allegedly am, wouldn’t I just say, ‘Yes, I hate black people’?”
Finally, Roof said it’s fair to say that the prosecutors hate him since they’re seeking the death penalty.
Not once during his very brief remarks did Roof say they he regretted his actions, which might have elicited some empathy from those burdened with determining his fate. Indeed, in a jailhouse journal, he wrote that he isn’t sorry and that he hadn’t shed a tear for the “innocent people I killed.”
Throughout the proceedings, my mind kept wandering to an earlier case I covered when Bruck was fighting another death penalty — the1994 trial of Susan Smith, the young mother who rolled her car into a Union, South Carolina, lake, drowning her two small children.
The crime was heinous and the trial heart-wrenching. At one point during the father’s testimony, the judge had to call for a break because nearly everyone in the courtroom, including the media, was weeping. The father had been talking about his 3-year-old’s favorite Disney movie, which the child called, “One-o-one Dalmahay-tions.”
Susan Smith threw herself across the defense table, loudly sobbing with the agony of regret and the sorrow of inconsolable loss. Yes, she was responsible for her children’s death, but there was no questioning her remorse or doubting that her life in prison would be an endless night of piercing pain.
For death penalty opponents like me, this seemed a far more just end than death would have been. With Roof, there’s plainly no sense of sorrow now — or to come. In the end evidence of sincere remorse, which is to say, humanity, can be the difference between life and death.