Jury seated in S.C. church shooting

CHARLESTON, S.C. — A federal court seated a jury Wednesday morning for the death penalty trial of Dylann S. Roof, the self-avowed white supremacist accused of killing nine black parishioners during a Bible study session at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church here in June 2015.

The jury includes nine whites and three African-Americans. Ten of the jurors are women.

The opening of Roof ’s trial comes as the city’s race relations are already on edge two days after a judge declared a mistrial in the case of Michael Slager, the former North Charleston police officer who shot an unarmed black man as a bystander recorded the confrontation on video. The deadlocked jury in that trial, held in the Charleston County courthouse, consisted of 11 whites and one African-American.

Lawyers for Roof, 22, asked Judge Richard M. Gergel late Tuesday afternoon to delay his trial out of concern that the federal jury might try to compensate for the verdict in the Slager case. “The risk that the defendant’s soon-tobe-empaneled jury will feel pressure to respond to widespread frustration and anxiety aroused by the Slager mistrial is too great to ignore,” they wrote. Gergel quickly rejected the request, calling it “utterly far-fetched and illogical.”

Eighteen months after the church shootings devastated the historic 198-yearold congregation and its city, the case against Roof — conducted to date on paper in 768 docket entries, many of them sealed — finally unfolded in open court.

The Justice Department has charged Roof with 33 federal criminal counts, including hate crimes resulting in death, claiming that he sat with the worshippers for nearly an hour on the evening of June 17, 2015, and then, without warning, pulled out a Glock .45 caliber handgun and fired 77 times. He hurled racial insults as he methodically shot one victim after the other.

The Justice Department is seeking the death penalty for Roof, who had offered to plead guilty in exchange for a sentence of life in prison. The government’s decision has been the subject of some skepticism in South Carolina, where survivors of the attack and many family members of the victims oppose the death penalty.

GRACE BEAHM / THE POST AND COURIER U.S. Department of Homeland Security officers stand guard outside the Federal Courthouse in Charleston, S.C., during Dylann Roof’s trial on Wednesday. Roof, a white man, is accused of killing nine black people at a church.

Roof is accused of fatally shooting 9 church members.