This is how the penalty phase started out today.
I'll post again when there is a verdict.
Dylann Roof, Addressing Court, Offers No Apology or Explanation for Massacre
By Alan Blinder and Kevin Sack | The New York Times| January 4, 2017 CHARLESTON, S.C. — Sometime in the six weeks after he killed nine Bible study worshipers at this city’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, Dylann S. Roof wrote in a journal that he had “not shed a tear for the innocent people I killed.” On Wednesday morning, standing before the jurors who will decide whether he should be put to death, Mr. Roof again offered no apology, no explanation and no remorse for the horrific massacre.
In a strikingly brief opening statement in the penalty phase of his trial in Federal District Court, where he is representing himself, Mr. Roof repeatedly assured jurors that he was not mentally ill, and left it at that. “There’s nothing wrong with me psychologically,” he said, of a factor that could determine life or death, before striding back to the defense table, taking a deep breath.
By then, Courtroom No. 6 had already been jarred by a reading of two pages from Mr. Roof’s journal, a white supremacist manifesto written in Charleston County’s jail.
“I would like to make it crystal clear I do not regret what I did,” Mr. Roof wrote in the journal, which officials seized in August 2015 and a prosecutor introduced during his opening statement. “I am not sorry.”
Mr. Roof, who was then 21, also wrote: “I do feel sorry for the innocent white children forced to live in this sick country and I do feel sorry for the innocent white people that are killed daily at the hands of the lower race. I have shed a tear of self-pity for myself. I feel pity that I had to do what I did in the first place. I feel pity that I had to give up my life because of a situation that should never have existed.”
As he began to lay out the government’s case for a death sentence, the prosecutor who read from the journal, Assistant United States Attorney Nathan S. Williams, told the jury of 10 women and two men that Mr. Roof’s killing spree had been a premeditated act that had devastated the families of his victims.
“The defendant didn’t stop after shooting one person or two or four or five; he killed nine people,” Mr. Williams said, a few moments before he declared: “The death penalty is justified.”
Later, aided by a slide show of pictures, he described each of the victims and their lives.
More at link:
http://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/04/us/dy ... ncing.html