President Joe Biden has decided not to commute the death sentence of Dylann Roof, who murdered nine members of a black church during a Bible study.
On Monday, the Biden administration announced that the president was commuting the death sentences of 37 individuals in federal prison, changing their sentences to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
The announcement highlighted that Biden “believes that America must stop the use of the death penalty at the federal level” except in cases involving “terrorism and hate-motivated mass murder.”
However, Roof was excluded from those eligible for commutation. He entered the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, in June 2015 during a Wednesday Bible study and killed nine black church members in an attempt to incite a race war.
The other two federal death row inmates not granted commuted sentences are Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, responsible for the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, and Robert Bowers, who killed 11 congregants at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 2018, as reported by The Associated Press.
Roof was found guilty in December 2016 of 33 charges related to federal hate crimes resulting in death, obstruction of religion, and firearms violations for his actions at the AME church. In January 2017, Roof was sentenced to death, becoming the first person in United States history to be ordered executed for being found guilty of a federal hate crime.
In August 2021, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit upheld his death sentence, stating that no legal record “can capture the full horror of what Roof did.” The panel rejected Roof's claims in his appeal, which argued that errors had been made regarding his competency to stand trial for the nine murders.
“Roof murdered African Americans at their church, during their Bible study and worship. They had welcomed him. He slaughtered them. He did so with the express intent of terrorizing not just his immediate victims at the historically important Mother Emanuel Church, but as many similar people as would hear of the mass murder,” the opinion read.
It further noted, “No cold record or careful parsing of statutes and precedents can capture the full horror of what Roof did. His crimes qualify him for the harshest penalty that a just society can impose.”
