How some unhinged killers avoid death row

“I’m not crazy. I have to do this,” the shooter explained as he murdered nine innocents at their evening Bible study.

America’s justice system readily accepted Dylann Roof ’s self-diagnosis.

Mental impairment would have provided his lawyers their only real argument against the death penalty for the 2015 massacre at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina.

But Roof ’s dogged insistence that “there was nothing wrong with me psychologically,” spared the jurors from the contentious issue that, five years later, would split the Nikolas Cruz jury nine-to-three.

With nothing much in the way of mitigating factors to consider, the Charleston jury took less than two hours to recommend a death sentence.

Good riddance, I suppose. Roof was an unsympathetic horror, a white supremacist who hoped that the mass murder of Black churchgoers would ignite a race war.

Even his mugshot, with that cretinous stare, could creep you out.

Yet, there’s something unsettling about a legal system that allows a delusional, ninthgrade dropout to make an idiot legal argument to the jury deciding whether he should live or die.

Roof had fired his attorney — a death penalty specialist — before the sentencing phase of the trial for suggesting to the court that his client might be suffering a psychological disorder.

Obviously, something was amiss in his twisted psyche, but Roof, now acting as his own attorney, told the judge, “I will not be calling mental health experts or presenting mental health evidence.”

Unlike the Fort Lauderdale jury that decided Nikolas Cruz’s fate, the Charleston panel heard no mitigating evidence about a troubled childhood or a history of mental disorders. He called no witnesses. His legal defense against capital punishment was no defense at all.

Life on death row has since altered Roof ’s thinking. A new set of lawyers appealed his sentence, arguing that, given their client’s mental disorders (schizophrenia, autism, anxiety, depression), the trial judge should have saved the “clearly delusional” Roof from himself.

On Oct. 11, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected that appeal.

That same day in Fort Lauderdale, a lawyer for Nikolas Cruz was making a convincing argument — convincing at least to three jurors — that her murderous client’s “brain was irretrievably broken” by his mother’s unfettered use of alcohol and drugs during her pregnancy.

The resulting automatic life sentence for Cruz ignited a furor hereabouts, particularly among the relatives of his 17 murder victims. The influential Parkland families had already persuaded the governor to remove a Broward sheriff and empanel a “statewide” grand jury to investigate the Broward school district.

Now, Parkland families want something done about the Florida law that requires a unanimous jury consensus for a death sentence. Legislators might do just that, given that the Parkland families have political clout that must be envied by relatives of other massacre victims.

When Esteban Santiago, who murdered five random travelers and wounded six others at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport in 2017, was spared the death penalty, there were no such protests from the victims’ families. They accepted that, although Santiago was deemed legally sane, he had been in the grips of schizophrenic delusions during his killing spree. He was given a life sentence, with none of the angry reaction that would erupt when Nikolas Cruz received the same sentence.

Whatever mental disorders Cruz suffered, they hardly registered against the horrors this social misfit wrought on Valentine’s Day 2018. Not for much of this community.

But before legislators repeal the 2017 unanimous-verdict requirement that kept Cruz off death row (which would have no retroactive effect on his case), they should consider the Florida judicial system’s appalling record of wrongful convictions. Thirty Florida prisoners given death sentences have been exonerated, more than any other state. All had been condemned before death verdicts required jury unanimity.

Of course, the 23 states and 108 nations that have abolished the death penalty are immune from the kind of divisiveness caused by the Cruz case. Also, the Death Penalty Information Center reports that death penalty states suffer higher homicide rates than those without. But, come on, the death penalty isn’t about deterring crime. It’s about retribution.

If the jury had condemned Cruz to die instead, he would have hardly been an anomaly on the mental ward known as death row.

In 2017, Harvard Law School released a study of prisoners consigned to Florida’s death row before the unanimous jury requirement. Two thirds of the condemned suffered from “serious mental impairments.”

Which seems fitting for a justice system so utterly inconsistent in dealing with mentally damaged defendants, it might be diagnosed as schizophrenic.