Charleston church shooter seeks Supreme Court appeal

Charleston church shooter Dylann Roof has asked the Supreme Court to review his case after a lower federal appeals court declined to vacate his convictions and death sentence. 

His court papers did not say explicitly what relief Roof is ultimately seeking from the court, and an attorney for Roof would not speak on the record. Roof has been unsuccessful in previous efforts to vacate the convictions and death sentence he was handed for the racially motivated 2015 shooting deaths of nine Black congregants at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C.

In his request for appeal, Roof urged the justices to review his case to resolve several broad legal questions that have produced divergent interpretations in federal appeals courts across the country, and which Roof claims affected his case. 

Among those issues are the breakdown in authority between a defendant and his legal counsel over whether to show a jury mitigating evidence of a defendant’s purported mental illness, which can lead to a lighter sentence. 

During sentencing, Roof fired his legal counsel and represented himself after the court told him that he could not stop his attorneys from introducing evidence depicting him as mentally ill, despite his objection. As a result, his brief argued, Roof presented “no evidence or intelligible argument for his own life.” 

In the Wednesday filing, Roof’s attorneys argued that most courts take the opposite approach, “leaving this deeply personal choice to a defendant” over whether the mitigating evidence be kept out.

“Had Roof been tried in any one of those majority jurisdictions, he would not have been forced to self-represent at his capital trial to block his own attorneys from presenting evidence he abhorred,” his filing reads. “Though his crime was undeniably horrible and the government’s case in aggravation substantial, Roof had a meaningful non-mental-health mitigation defense that jurors should have heard.”

The latest development in Roof’s case comes after a unanimous three-judge panel presiding in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit unanimously affirmed his execution last August.