CHARLESTON, S.C. — Dylann Roof, the man responsible for killing nine people at a South Carolina church, has taken the next step in his federal appeal of his death sentence.
On Wednesday, Roof's lawyers filed a petition with the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals seeking to challenge the court's confirmation of his conviction and death sentence for the 2015 racist slayings of nine members of a Black South Carolina congregation.
Last month, a three-judge panel of the court unanimously upheld Roof’s conviction and sentence, rejecting arguments that the young white man should have been ruled incompetent to stand trial in the shootings at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston. Now, Roof wants the full court to consider his appeal.
Roof is a white supremacist who wrote repeatedly about his beliefs before the killings and afterward in both jail and prison.
In 2017, Roof became the first person in the U.S. sentenced to death for a federal hate crime. Roof opened fire during the closing prayer of a 2015 Bible study session at Charleston's Mother Emanuel AME Church.
Attorneys for Roof told an appeals court in May that Roof's theory that he’d be saved by white nationalists - but only if he kept mental health evidence out of his defense - should have shown his trial judge he wasn’t competent.
But in August, the three-person pane of the 4th U.S. Circuit ruled the judge in his case acted appropriately.
"No cold record or careful parsing of statutes and precedents can capture the full horror of what Roof did," the court wrote in their opinion. "His crimes qualify him for the harshest penalty that a just society can impose."
Following his federal trial, Roof was given nine consecutive life sentences after pleading guilty in 2017 to state murder charges, leaving him to await execution in a federal prison and sparing his victims and their families the burden of a second trial.