For all his ignorance, the 21-year-old racist who murdered nine black church members as they held a Bible study back in June, will face the death penalty according to an announcement made today by South Carolina prosecutors.
A judge entered a not guilty plea for Roof, who faces nine counts of murder, one count of attempted murder, and a weapons charge.
According to court documents filed by South Carolina prosecutor Scarlett Wilson today, the state will present a litany of evidence against Roof, including “photographs, video tapes, diagrams of the scene and victims, expert testimony, and statements by the Defendant, internet postings by the Defendant and other testimony related thereto.”
Roof’s alleged white power manifesto, laying out his hatred for black people and apparent motivation for the attacks, was discovered online shortly after his arrest.
He has also pleaded not guilty to 33 federal hate crime counts. US Attorney General Loretta Lynch announced those charges in July, saying Roof “decided to seek out and murder African Americans because of their race.”
Roof, the twenty something old racist from South Carolina, was indicted in the killing of none black church goers. If convicted, the self admitted killer can receive life in prison or the death penalty.
Roof faces a total of 33 federal charges, including firearms charges, for the June 17 murders and attempted murders at Charleston’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, the United States Department of Justice announced on Wednesday.
The hate crime charges are meant to address the radical racial motivations of the crime, according to the DOJ, which Roof allegedly laid out in an online manifesto.
“As set forth in the indictment, several months prior to the tragic events of June 17, Roof conceived of his goal of increasing racial tensions throughout the nation and seeking retribution for perceived wrongs he believed African Americans had committed against white people,” U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch said in prepared statement on Wednesday. “To carry out these twin goals of fanning racial flames and exacting revenge, Roof further decided to seek out and murder African Americans because of their race. An essential element of his plan, however, was to find his victims inside of a church, specifically an African-American church, to ensure the greatest notoriety and attention to his actions.”
The South Carolina Senate has voted and the vote was overwhelming – 37 to 3 in favor of removing the confederate flag from Statehouse grounds in the state!
“We now have the opportunity, the obligation to put the exclamation point on an extraordinary narrative of good and evil, of love and mercy that will take its place in the history books,” said Sen. Tom Davis, R-Beaufort.
Lawmakers had largely ignored the flag until the killing of nine black people during a Bible study at a historic African-American church on June 17.
The terrorists in our midst are not ISIS, but racists calling themselves white supremaists, or to speak in lament terms, ignorant white people who think they are better than the rest of us.
Since the gruesome killing of 9 people at a South Carolina black Church a week ago, at least two more predominantly black Churches have suffered the same type of hate historically associated with these ignorant people. One Church in Georgia and another in North Carolina.
In Georgia, God’s Power of Christ Church in Macon was set on fire early Tuesday morning. Macon county fire chief Ben Gleaton, told local media that as per investigators, the fire was intentionally started. And in Charlotte North Carolina, firefighters there are calling another fire at another black church an intentional act.
Amazingly, the same folks who think they’re superior to everyone else, are the same folks committing these neanderthal acts.
In an interview with CNN, the Republican – yes, only a Republican would come up with such garbage to spew on television – said that the nine victims who welcomed their killer in their Church and then murdered by that killer as they held a Bible study, are to be blamed for their demise.
According to State Representative Bill Chumley, if the pastor or any of the other eight victims had a gun while studying the word of God and that pesky commandment that says, thou shall not kill, then one of them could have used their gun and blasted the killer’s remains all over the front pews.
Chumley believes that the victims were just sitting there patiently waiting for their chance to get shot, and he ponders, “Why didn’t somebody just do something?”
CNN is reporting that Walmart has decided to stop selling merchandize promoting the logo of the confederate flag.
“We never want to offend anyone with the products that we offer,” Walmart spokesman Brian Nick said. “We have taken steps to remove all items promoting the confederate flag from our assortment — whether in our stores or on our web site. We have a process in place to help lead us to the right decisions when it comes to the merchandise we sell. Still, at times, items make their way into our assortment improperly — this is one of those instances.”
The confederate flag, a symbol of racism and a favorite icon of white supremacy groups, has come under fire since Dylann Roof – one of its followers – went into a predominantly black Church in Charleston South Carolina and murdered nine people as they held a Bible study. South Carolina’s governor Nikki Haley has finally suggested removing the flag from certain government facilities in her state.
And he is running for President of the United States!
“This is the M-O of this administration,” the Republican presidential candidate said in an interview with Newsmax. “Any time there is an accident like this — the president is clear, he doesn’t like for Americans to have guns and so he uses every opportunity, this being another one, to basically go parrot that message.”
The “accident” Perry was referring to is the intentional, calculated shooting of 9 black people in a South Carolina Church by a racist 21-year-old. The former Republican governor of Texas also chalked up the massacre to the need for more prescription drugs.
“Also, I think there is a real issue to be talked about,” Perry continued. “It seems to me, again without having all the details about this, that these individuals have been medicated and there may be a real issue in this country from the standpoint of these drugs and how they’re used.”
The leader of a white supremacist group that apparently influenced Dylann Roof, the suspect in the killing of nine African-Americans in a Charleston, S.C., church last week, has donated tens of thousands of dollars to Republican campaigns, including those of 2016 presidential contenders such as Ted Cruz, Rick Santorum and Rand Paul, the New York Times reports.
Mr. Cruz, a Texas senator, said Sunday night that he would be returning about $8,500 in donations that he had received from the Texas donor, Earl Holt III, who lists himself as president of the Council of Conservative Citizens.
“We just learned this evening that Mr. Holt had contributed to the campaign,” a spokesman for the Cruz campaign said in an email to The New York Times. “We will be immediately refunding all those donations.”
Mr. Paul’s campaign said it planned to send $2,250 received from Mr. Holt to a victims’ fund set up in the wake of the shooting.
Earl Holt III, president of the Council of Conservative Citizens, in a 2013 image taken from the council’s website.
“RandPAC is donating the funds to the Mother Emanuel Hope Fund to assist the victims families,” said Sergio Gor, a spokesman for the campaign. Mr. Holt made four separate donations to the Paul campaign last year, records show. The campaign could not confirm the total received but said that all the money it identified from the white supremacist leader would be donated to the fund.
The Guardian first reported on Mr. Holt’s donations to the Republican contenders.
Racial politics is sometimes like the weather. Everybody complains about it or has an opinion about it, but there’s precious little that we can seemingly do about it. Here we are again, having the same conversation about the same issue and the politicians are crafting their statements and the sociologists are telling us about how the Internet is the problem and the gun enthusiasts are telling us that it’s a mental health issue and there’s a debate about whether this is only a hate crime or is it home-grown terrorism. And then there’s that darned Confederate flag flying over Charleston. Which seems to be causing a bit of angst in the Republican Party.
The race is on and race is now a major part of it. This time, though, it feels different.
Nine African-Americans were killed in their church simply because they were African-Americans. Yes, I know that many people say that Walter Scott and Eric Garner and Michael Brown were killed because they were African-American, but they were also involved in activities that brought them attention from the law. The victims in Charleston were doing no such thing. They were being good citizens, were praying, were welcoming a stranger into their world as many other Americans would. Such a terrible tragedy.
What we know for sure is that the shooter did not like black people, and he said so explicitly. He grew up in a country that’s supposed to be post-racial with a more enlightened group of young people who did not experience the Civil Rights movement or institutional segregation. They’re supposed to be more welcoming, more open, more accepting. We now know about one of the exceptions to that interpretation.
But we are also at the beginning of a presidential election cycle and we need to measure the candidates and potential candidates against their words and actions. The initial reactions were sober and immediate, with quick condemnations and expressions of horror and disbelief. That sentiment soon turned to the issue of why Dylann Roof perpetrated this crime. Many on the right called it an attack on religion.Some said worse things. President Obama looked anguished and sad when he addressed the news media the day after the killings, and his inclusion of the gun issue showed that he truly regrets not being able to get any kind of meaningful background check legislation through the Congress.
I want to know specifically what the candidates plans are in reaction to this event. They all say that we need to bring the country together, but how will they do this? I understand that I might have to wait a good long time, but now is the moment when we need to push anyone who wants to occupy the Oval Office in 2017 for answers. Specific answers.
Right now we’re asking questions from our homes and places of worship. Next time, we’ll be in the streets.
Karl Rove, like many other Republicans, have been a staunch advocate for more guns. The idea these people always put forward in times of shootings and massacres, is the only solution to end gun violence is to have more guns on the streets. Well after the most recent shootings in South Carolina where 9 people died at the hands of a racist 21-year-old, Karl Rove appears to have had a change of heart.
Appearing on Fox News’, Rove was interviewed by Chris Wallace and was asked about the recent gun violence in South Carolina, and his response appeared to be a step away from his usual more guns is the answer stance, and a step towards more common sense gun policies.
WALLACE: How do we stop the violence?
What do you think?
ROVE: I wish I had an easy answer for that, but I don’t think there’s an easy answer
What do you think?
We saw an act of evil. Racist, bigoted evil, and to me the amazing thing is that it was met with grief and love. Think about how far we’ve come since 1963. The whole weight of the government throughout the South was to impede finding and holding and bringing to justice the men who perpetrated the [Birmingham] bombing.
What do you think?
And here, we saw an entire state, an entire community, an entire nation come together, grieving as one and united in the belief that this was an evil act, so we’ve come a long way.
What do you think?
Now maybe there’s some magic law that will keep us from having more of these. I mean basically the only way to guarantee that we will dramatically reduce acts of violence involving guns is to basically remove guns from society, and until somebody gets enough “oomph” to repeal the Second Amendment, that’s not going to happen.
Moments after it was known that Dylann Roof committed the horrendous act of murdering nine people in a South Carolina Church, people took to the internet to learn more about the racist 21-year-old. Facebook was naturally one avenue for information on the killer and before his Facebook profile was eventually taken down, one man found Roof’s profile and left the only comment on this picture of Dylann Roof:
The man who left the sole comment on Roof’s photo is Marcus Stanley, a 30-year-old who, according to his website, was also shot eight times in the past.
He sat in their midst in a South Carolina Church for over an hour as they showed him love and held a Bible study. Then, Dylann Roof stood up and murdered nine human beings in Church as they worshiped God. The last thing these people heard from their murderer was his racist rants about his hate for black people.
But the love and the forgiveness of the families of the nine is outstanding and something admirable. This forgiveness is something the rest of this nation and the world can learn from. The killer, Dylann Roof, is shown on video in his bail hearing when one by one, the remaining families and friends of those he murdered, forgave him for murdering their loved ones.
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