Admitted white nationalist Dylann Roof was quickly convicted by a South Carolina federal jury on Thursday of all 33 hate-crime charges against him in the Charleston church massacre trial.
It took jurors just two hours to find Roof, 22, guilty of fatally shooting nine African-American worshipers as they stood and closed their eyes to pray during a Wednesday night Bible study in the basement of the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in June 2015.
Roof, who eagerly confessed that he’d hoped to start a race war, stood without apparent emotion in the hushed courtroom as the jury foreman declared him guilty of hate crimes resulting in death, of obstructing religion, and of using a firearm to commit murder.
He must now wait until early next year for the penalty phase of the trial, during which the same jury will determine if he will be executed or allowed to live out his life in prison. He said two weeks ago that he plans to act as his own lawyer for that phase.
The majority female and white jury — comprised of one black man and one white man, and two black women and eight white women — had sat through six days of testimony, and began deliberating at 1:15 p.m. Thursday.
The 3:20 p.m. verdict followed closing arguments by both sides earlier in the day.
“There is no bravery in this defendant,” Assistant US Attorney Nathan Williams told jurors, a reference to Roof’s claims that no one else was brave enough to have committed the killings.
Instead, Roof’s “actions show the cowardice that he had on that day,” Williams said. “You can see what kind of hatred he had: a vast hatred that was cold and calculated.”
The prosecutor added, “He must be held accountable for each and every action he took inside that church. For every life he took.”
Roof did not take the stand in his own defense, and his lawyers did not call witnesses on his behalf. Instead, defense lawyer David Bruck used his closings as what may be his only chance to argue against the death penalty.
Bruck tried to portray Roof as an impressionable, suicidal young man whose hatred was fueled by white supremacist websites.
Prosecutors got the last word, though. Assistant US Attorney Stephen Curran told jurors that Roof meticulously planned the attack over the course of months, then made a two-hour taped confession in which he eagerly and cogently celebrated what he’d just done.
“You see a calm, confident, callous man who showed no sign that mental illness had anything to do with it,” Richardson said.