On the evening of June 17, 2015, twelve members and leaders of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, gathered at the church for their weekly Wednesday night Bible study. All twelve were African American. A young white man they had never met joined them, and they welcomed him. Before the evening ended, nine of the twelve were dead. Three survived.
The man was Dylann Storm Roof, then 21 years old, from Lexington, South Carolina. He was arrested in North Carolina the next morning and confessed to FBI agents within hours. A federal jury in Charleston convicted him in December 2016 on all 33 counts of a federal indictment that charged him with racially motivated hate crimes, with obstructing the free exercise of religion, and with related offenses, and in January 2017 the same jury sentenced him to death. The Justice Department said he was the first person to receive the death penalty for federal hate crimes. In April 2017 he pleaded guilty in state court to nine counts of murder and received nine consecutive life sentences.
The trial is remembered for what Roof chose to do with it. Over the objections of the lawyers appointed to defend him, he represented himself during jury selection and again during the penalty phase, and he used that right to keep the jury from hearing any evidence about his mental health. The federal appeals court that upheld his sentence in 2021, a panel of judges from three other circuits brought in because every judge of the Fourth Circuit stepped aside, spent nearly 150 pages on that choice and the competency findings that allowed it. His collateral challenge to the sentence was still pending in the fall of 2026, and he remained on federal death row.
Emanuel AME Church is known to its members and to Charleston as Mother Emanuel. The federal appeals court called it "historic" in the first sentence of its opinion, and the jury heard that the church stands in a part of Charleston visited by tourists. Its Bible study met every Wednesday night.
Those who gathered on June 17 were parishioners and leaders of the church.
The Reverend Clementa Pinckney led the church and made a point of drawing young people into the AME church. He was remembered as a private man who kept a low profile, followed the Pittsburgh Steelers and treasured his family above everything.
The Reverend Sharonda Coleman-Singleton treated her faith as her true calling. She had a way of speaking to a room as though she were speaking to each person alone, and she prayed over her family every night.
The Reverend Depayne Middleton-Doctor had joined Emanuel only recently, and coming to the Wednesday study was part of her commitment to it. She was remembered as tender and generous, a woman who would hand her own food to someone else even when she had nothing left for herself.
The Reverend Daniel Simmons Sr. had grown up in the church. Friends called him Dapper Dan for his polished shoes and good hats. He sang in church although singing was not his gift, doted on his family, traveled to see the people he loved and was still driving himself to the end.
The Reverend Myra Thompson was confident she had raised her children with strong values.
Cynthia Hurd had sat in Emanuel's pews every Sunday as a child while her mother sang in the choir. She was a lifelong reader who felt most comfortable in church, and she pushed the people around her to keep learning and keep growing.
Ethel Lee Lance had spent so much of her life at Emanuel that she seemed part of the building itself. She took pride in how she looked, kept a weekly manicure in pink or bright red, and played gospel music on Saturdays.
Susie Jackson was the matriarch of a large family and would travel any distance to be present for its milestones. Church came first for her, and she taught her family to hold it that way. She was remembered as peaceful and loving, someone who always kept God first.
Tywanza Sanders was creative and curious about everything. He loved fishing and wrote poetry, leaving a large collection of writing behind him.
Three people survived. The federal counts of attempt to kill named all three.
Roof was a white South Carolina native living in Lexington, west of Columbia. State court records in June 2015 showed a pending felony case against him and an earlier misdemeanor trespassing charge.
Testing done for the federal case placed his full-scale IQ at 125 and his verbal IQ at 141. The experts who examined him disagreed sharply about what was wrong with him. The court-appointed psychiatrist found social anxiety disorder and schizoid personality disorder, with possible autistic traits but no psychotic process. Defense experts diagnosed autism spectrum disorder and placed him somewhere on the schizophrenia spectrum.
The government proved at trial that he had prepared for months, and the jury later found beyond a reasonable doubt that he had engaged in substantial planning and premeditation. The courts relied on that evidence, and on his own admissions, to find that he chose a historic Black church in order to magnify the impact of the murders.
Charleston police released images of the suspect on the morning of June 18, and the FBI joined the investigation, which was treated from the start as a hate crime. Late that morning, after a tip from a member of the public, police in Shelby, North Carolina, roughly 250 miles north of Charleston, took Roof into custody. Police said he had acted alone.
In Shelby he waived his Miranda rights in writing and spoke with two FBI agents for about two hours. He confessed to the killings and made clear that his motive was racial. At one point he said he regretted what he had done "a little bit." The Fourth Circuit later wrote that his "meticulous planning" contradicted that.
He waived extradition in North Carolina the same day, was flown back to South Carolina that evening and was held in Charleston. The day after the killings the state charged him with nine counts of murder, three counts of attempted murder and a further offense.
On July 22, 2015, a federal grand jury in the District of South Carolina returned a 33-count indictment, announced by the Attorney General in Washington. Counts 1 through 9 charged racially motivated hate crimes resulting in death under 18 U.S.C. § 249(a)(1), the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act. Counts 10 through 12 charged racially motivated hate crimes involving an attempt to kill. Counts 13 through 21 charged obstructing religious exercise resulting in death under 18 U.S.C. § 247(a)(2) and (d)(1). Counts 22 through 24 charged obstructing religious exercise involving an attempt to kill, under § 247(a)(2), (d)(1) and (d)(3). Counts 25 through 33, one for each of the dead, were brought under 18 U.S.C. § 924(c) and (j). South Carolina had no hate crime statute of its own, which is why those charges could only be brought in federal court.
The two cases ran side by side. Both governments gave notice that they would seek the death penalty. The federal notice came on May 24, 2016, after what the Attorney General described as a formal review. In it prosecutors listed four gateway intent factors, three statutory aggravating factors (that he killed or attempted to kill more than one person in a single criminal episode, that he engaged in substantial planning and premeditation, and that three of the dead were particularly vulnerable because of their age) and six more, including that he had tried to incite violence by others, had caused injury and loss to the families and friends of the dead, and had chosen worshippers at Mother Emanuel to magnify the impact of his crimes.
Roof, through his lawyers, offered to plead guilty in exchange for life without parole. The federal government declined. The district court entered a plea of not guilty on his behalf and set trial for November 7, 2016.
The federal court appointed a lawyer with long capital-case experience to lead Roof's defense, and that team prepared a penalty-phase case built on his mental health. Roof learned about it only when the government's own examining psychiatrist mentioned that his lawyers intended to call an autism expert. The news set off what the defense described as a substantial change in his mood. He wrote to the prosecution, accusing his own lawyers of misconduct and calling their planned defense a lie told without his consent.
Shortly before jury selection the defense asked for a closed hearing about the letter, and then for a competency hearing. On November 7 the judge questioned Roof directly. Roof said he understood that if he offered no mitigation evidence he would very likely be sentenced to death, and that he would accept that rather than have the jury hear he was autistic. The judge, the appeals court noted, pressed him on the point in several different ways, and Roof gave the same answer each time.
The court postponed individual jury selection and appointed an independent psychiatrist to evaluate him. His report arrived on November 15. The defense asked for more time, saying it had been handed 92 pages of psychiatric and psychological reports on short notice and that its autism expert was out of the country. The court moved the hearing to November 21 and, when the defense asked for another week, refused, calling the claim that counsel was unprepared "not credible" and offering to let defense experts testify remotely.
Over November 21 and 22, the court-appointed psychiatrist testified that Roof understood the proceedings better than the average defendant and could help his lawyers if he chose to. In his view Roof's refusal to cooperate came not from psychosis but from a deep-seated racial prejudice that Roof did not want blurred by a mental health defense. A defense psychiatrist who had met Roof nine times disagreed, concluding that he had autism spectrum disorder and a psychotic disorder and was not competent, in part because he had said more than once that he would not be executed even if sentenced to death. A defense psychologist described an emerging schizophrenia-spectrum disorder but offered no settled conclusion on competency. The court found Roof competent to stand trial.
Roof then moved to discharge his lawyers and represent himself. The court explained what that would mean, warned him of the risks and granted the motion, keeping his lawyers in the courtroom as standby counsel. He conducted jury selection himself. When standby counsel tried to ask prospective jurors their own questions, the judge refused to let the defense "speak with two voices," and twice reminded Roof that he could change his mind. He did not.
Shortly before the guilt phase opened, Roof asked to hand the trial back to his lawyers for that phase alone while keeping the right to represent himself again at sentencing. The court agreed, after telling him that counsel would then control every strategic decision in the guilt phase. His motion for courtroom accommodations, including shorter days and breaks between witnesses, was denied.
Trial began on December 7, 2016. Two survivors framed the government's case, one testifying first and the other last. In between, jurors heard testimony from FBI agents, listened to the recording of his confession and heard his journal read into the record by a state law enforcement agent.
The defense did not contest that Roof had committed the killings. His lead lawyer asked the jury instead to consider why, arguing that Roof had absorbed his views from material he found online and repeated as his own, and pointing to photographs that showed how alone he was. On December 15, 2016, after deliberating for less than two hours, the jury found him guilty on all 33 counts. Roof told the judge the same day that he would represent himself at sentencing.
On December 29, before the penalty phase began, standby counsel challenged his competency again, both to stand trial and to represent himself. They submitted new reports from four experts, three of whom had given opinions in November and one, a neuropsychologist, who was offering his first. Out of what the judge called an abundance of caution, the court ordered the independent psychiatrist to examine Roof again and set a hearing for January 2, 2017, but limited the evidence to developments since the November hearing.
The psychiatrist, who had spent five more hours with Roof over two days, testified that nothing had changed: Roof still understood the proceedings and could help his lawyers if he wished, and his rejection of mental health evidence was a logical extension of his political beliefs rather than a product of illness. An autism expert for the defense described traits she believed could impair his ability to assist in his defense. An Orthodox Christian priest who had visited Roof weekly since about a week after the killings, spending some 100 hours with him, testified that he could explain the crime only as mental illness. Three of Roof's lawyers filed a sworn declaration describing his behavior during the trial, including his belief that the jurors liked him and would spare him.
At the end of the hearing the judge questioned Roof again. Roof acknowledged a high risk that he would be sentenced to death, and executed, if he presented no mitigation, and confirmed that he wanted to represent himself so his lawyers could not undermine his message with mental health evidence. The court found him "plainly competent," concluding that his resistance to that evidence arose from his political ideology rather than from any mental disease or defect.
The penalty phase opened on January 3, 2017, with Roof as his own lawyer. The government called 23 victim-impact witnesses. Roof's objection to the number was overruled. Jurors saw and heard the dead as their families and congregation had known them, in recordings of them teaching, singing and praying and in photographs of several of the nine in church. The court reminded the jury that such testimony was limited to the victims' personal characteristics and the effect of their loss on their families.
The jury also heard from a county detention officer in Charleston who screened inmate mail. She described writings Roof had produced in custody, including an outgoing letter she had intercepted, which the prosecution used to argue that he was still trying to incite violence. Roof did not cross-examine her.
He called no witnesses and presented no evidence. In his closing statement he told the jurors that he had the right to ask them for a life sentence but was not sure what good it would do, and he did not ask them to spare him. He told them he did not have a mental illness.
During deliberations the jury sent two questions about the mitigating factors Roof had proposed, asking whether "violence" in prison included inciting violence by others and whether safe confinement included his writing getting out. The court told the jurors to read the factors as written and apply their common sense. On January 10, 2017, after about three hours, the jury unanimously found every gateway intent factor and every aggravating factor beyond a reasonable doubt. It found that most of his mitigating factors existed but rejected three: that he was capable of redemption, that he posed no significant risk of dangerousness in prison and that he could be safely confined. It found that the aggravating factors sufficiently outweighed the mitigating ones and sentenced him to death on each capital count. The court entered death sentences on Counts 13 through 21 and 25 through 33, and life imprisonment without the possibility of release on the remaining counts.
Roof still faced the state's capital prosecution in Charleston. On April 10, 2017, at the Charleston County Judicial Center, he pleaded guilty to the state murder charges and was sentenced to nine consecutive life terms. The state gave up its pursuit of the death penalty in return for the plea and for his removal to a federal institution outside Charleston. The state's prosecutor called the plea an insurance policy for the federal conviction. Roof, then 23, was returned to federal custody to await execution.
Roof's appeal reached the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. Every judge of that court recused, one of them having worked on the prosecution as an assistant United States attorney, so a panel of three judges from the Third, Sixth and Eighth Circuits sat by designation. Two autism advocacy groups filed a brief in support of the government. The panel heard argument on May 25, 2021, and on August 25, 2021, affirmed in a published opinion issued in the name of the court.
It rejected all of the issues Roof raised. On competency, it found no clear error in either finding, and no abuse of discretion in the court's refusal of further delays or in its decision to limit the second hearing to new developments. On self-representation, it held that a capital defendant has a Sixth Amendment right to represent himself at sentencing; that neither the Constitution nor the Federal Death Penalty Act requires mitigation evidence to be presented over a defendant's objection; that the Supreme Court's 2018 decision in McCoy v. Louisiana did not make blocking mental health evidence a protected defense "objective" that counsel had to honor; and that his waiver of counsel was knowing, voluntary and intelligent. On the penalty phase, it found no improper exclusion of mitigation evidence, held that isolated witness remarks calling him evil did not make the hearing fundamentally unfair, upheld the victim-impact evidence and the prosecution's closing argument, and declined to extend the constitutional bar on executing people who were under 18 at the time of their crimes to a 21-year-old. On the guilt phase, it upheld the religious-obstruction statute under the Commerce Clause both on its face and as applied, held that it did not require proof of hostility to religion, upheld the hate crime statute as a valid exercise of Congress's Thirteenth Amendment power, rejected his attack on the Attorney General's certification of the prosecution, and held that the hate crime and religious-obstruction offenses resulting in death were crimes of violence for the § 924 counts.
The opinion closed by saying that the panel had reached its conclusion "not as a product of emotion but through a thorough analytical process." In September 2021 the court declined to rehear the case en banc, refusing what it called the unprecedented step of seeking substitute judges from other circuits, because only active judges of the circuit could order a rehearing. On October 11, 2022, the Supreme Court of the United States declined to hear his appeal without comment. He had asked it to decide how courts should resolve disputes between capital defendants and their lawyers over mental health evidence.
On April 17, 2025, his post-conviction lawyers filed a motion under 28 U.S.C. § 2255 asking the district court to vacate or correct his conviction and sentence. The motion argued that his trial lawyers had misled him about the evidence they meant to present, that a communication disorder made him incompetent to represent himself, that sentencing him without any mitigation evidence violated his Fifth, Sixth and Eighth Amendment rights, that the trial judge had erred in letting him represent himself, and that the judge had been biased against the defense.
A related recusal motion rested on a sworn declaration by one of Roof's original lawyers, who had withdrawn before trial. The lawyer said that in the summer of 2015 another federal judge in the district told him that the trial judge "really wants to do it" and would be given the case. About a week after the motion was filed, on April 4, 2025, written statements from two other judges of the district appeared on the docket, and the court denied the motion minutes later. Roof petitioned the Fourth Circuit for a writ of mandamus ordering the judge off the case. On August 13, 2025, the court denied the petition, holding that he had not shown a clear and indisputable right to relief, that the claim rested on hearsay, and that a judge's forming a negative view of a defendant is not grounds for recusal. Panel rehearing was denied on September 30, 2025, and rehearing en banc on November 13, 2025, for lack of a quorum. On October 5, 2026, the Supreme Court denied his petition for certiorari. The § 2255 motion remained pending before the district court.
On December 23, 2024, President Joe Biden commuted the death sentences of 37 of the 40 people on federal death row to life without parole. He left three in place, and Roof's was one of them. Biden said the commutations were consistent with his administration's moratorium on federal executions except in cases of terrorism and hate-motivated mass killing. On April 24, 2026, the Justice Department announced that it had rescinded that moratorium and readopted a federal execution protocol.
As of October 2026 Roof remained on federal death row in Indiana, with no execution date set and his § 2255 motion undecided. The nine consecutive state life sentences remain in force.
The federal case rested on two civil rights statutes, each with its own constitutional footing, and each was challenged on appeal. The hate crime counts were brought under 18 U.S.C. § 249(a)(1), part of the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, which reaches racially motivated violence. Congress passed that subsection under the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery, and Roof argued that it went beyond the power the amendment gives. The Fourth Circuit held that the statute is appropriate legislation under controlling Thirteenth Amendment precedent. The statute also requires the Attorney General or a designee to certify that one of four conditions is met before a federal prosecution may proceed. In Roof's case the Attorney General certified that South Carolina lacked jurisdiction to bring a hate crime prosecution and that a federal prosecution was in the public interest and necessary to secure substantial justice.
The religious-obstruction counts were brought under 18 U.S.C. § 247, which punishes obstructing a person's free exercise of religion and rests on the Commerce Clause. To meet that requirement the government offered evidence at trial that Roof's preparations and the crime itself made use of channels of interstate commerce and of goods that had moved in interstate or foreign commerce. Roof argued that the statute was invalid on its face and as applied to him; the Fourth Circuit rejected both arguments and approved the jury instructions on the point. The death sentences rest on these counts and on the § 924 counts; the § 249 hate crime counts carried life terms.
The penalty phase followed the Federal Death Penalty Act. Under it, the government must prove at least one of four gateway intent factors and at least one statutory aggravating factor before the jury weighs aggravating against mitigating factors. Roof's jury found all of them, and its verdict was unanimous. The Act also directs the court of appeals to address every issue raised in a capital appeal and to consider whether the sentence was imposed under the influence of passion, prejudice or any other arbitrary factor. The Fourth Circuit found that it was not, and that the evidence supported each aggravating factor the jury found.
Roof's mental condition has been argued over since the fall of 2016 and has never been settled outside the competency findings. The court-appointed psychiatrist saw social anxiety, schizoid personality disorder and possible autistic traits that did not affect his competence; defense experts diagnosed autism spectrum disorder and psychotic or emerging schizophrenia-spectrum symptoms. The trial court, twice, and the appeals court found him competent both to stand trial and to represent himself. The 2025 motion renews the claim that he was not competent to represent himself, on the ground of a communication disorder, and the district court has not ruled on it.
The claim that the trial judge sought the case comes from one former defense lawyer's account of a 2015 conversation with another judge. The Fourth Circuit treated it as hearsay and held that it would not require recusal even if true. The other judges' written responses and the question of how they came to be on the docket remain disputed by Roof's lawyers, who called the court's handling of the matter an improper fact-finding exercise.
Roof's own statements about whether he regretted the murders were inconsistent. He told the FBI agents he regretted them a little; the jury rejected the mitigating factor that he was capable of redemption.
June 17, 2015: Nine members of the Wednesday night Bible study are killed at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston; three survive.
June 18, 2015: Roof is arrested in Shelby, North Carolina, confesses to FBI agents, waives extradition and is returned to Charleston.
June 2015: South Carolina charges him with nine counts of murder and three counts of attempted murder.
July 22, 2015: A federal grand jury returns a 33-count indictment.
May 24, 2016: The Justice Department files notice that it will seek the death penalty.
November 7, 2016: The court questions Roof about his letter attacking his lawyers' defense.
November 21 to 22, 2016: First competency hearing; he is found competent and then allowed to represent himself.
December 7, 2016: The guilt phase begins.
December 15, 2016: The jury convicts him on all 33 counts.
January 2, 2017: Second competency hearing; he is found plainly competent.
January 3, 2017: The penalty phase begins, with Roof representing himself.
January 10, 2017: The jury unanimously sentences him to death on each capital count.
April 10, 2017: He pleads guilty to the state murder charges and receives nine consecutive life sentences.
May 25, 2021: The Fourth Circuit hears argument before a panel of judges from other circuits.
August 25, 2021: The convictions and death sentences are affirmed.
September 2021: Rehearing en banc is denied.
October 11, 2022: The Supreme Court declines to hear his appeal.
December 23, 2024: President Biden commutes 37 federal death sentences; Roof's is one of three left in place.
April 4, 2025: The district court denies his motion to recuse the trial judge.
April 17, 2025: His lawyers file a § 2255 motion to vacate the conviction and sentence.
August 13, 2025: The Fourth Circuit denies his mandamus petition on recusal.
November 13, 2025: Rehearing en banc of the mandamus ruling is denied for lack of a quorum.
April 24, 2026: The Justice Department rescinds the federal execution moratorium.
October 5, 2026: The Supreme Court denies certiorari on the recusal question; the § 2255 motion remains pending.