Skip to footer

Will the Charleston shooter plead guilty?

South Carolina is pursuing the death penalty against Dylann Roof for murdering nine church members in Charleston, S.C., in June, giving him an incentive to plead not guilty. 

|
Grace Beahm/The Post and Courier via AP
Dylann Roof appears with lawyers Bill McGuire and Chief Public Defender Ashley Pennington at a court hearing in Charleston, S.C., in July.

| Charleston, S.C.

South Carolina will seek the death penalty against the man charged in the June massacre of nine people at a Charleston church, court documents showed on Thursday.

Dylann Roof, 21, faces charges of murdering nine members of the Emanuel AME Church during a Bible study session. Roof is white and the nine slain people were black.

Roof faces additional federal hate-crime charges that also raise the possibility of a death sentence.

Ninth Judicial Circuit Solicitor Scarlett Wilson, has scheduled a news conference for Thursday afternoon regarding the case against Roof.

In the court filings, she wrote that "Dylann Storm Roof by his act of murder knowingly created a great risk of death to more than one person in a public place."

The death penalty decision could determine how Roof pleads. He has not entered a plea so far in the state's murder case.

At his July 31 arraignment on separate federal hate-crime and firearms charges, his attorney said Roof wanted to plead guilty, but deferred a decision until U.S. prosecutors announced the death penalty in that case.

(Reporting by Letitia Stein; Editing by David Adams and Will Dunham)

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to Will the Charleston shooter plead guilty?
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2015/0903/Will-the-Charleston-shooter-plead-guilty
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe