On May 14, 2022, ten people were killed on the East Side of Buffalo, New York, and three more were seriously injured. All ten of the dead were Black. Payton Gendron, an 18-year-old from Conklin, a rural town in New York about three hours' drive from Buffalo, was arrested the same day. Within weeks he was the first person in New York to be indicted under the state's law against domestic terrorism motivated by hate, and in November 2022 he pleaded guilty to that count and to every other count the grand jury had returned. In February 2023 an Erie County Court judge sentenced him to life without the possibility of parole.
The state case closed quickly. The federal case did not. A federal grand jury indicted him in July 2022 on 27 counts, and in January 2024 the Justice Department gave notice that it would ask a jury to sentence him to death. His lawyers offered a guilty plea in exchange for a life sentence, and the government turned it down. After more than two years of motions, postponed hearings and an appeal by the prosecution, jury selection in the United States District Court in Buffalo began on October 13, 2026, with the evidence expected to open in December and the jury told to keep itself free through the end of February 2027.
The dead were Celestine Chaney, Geraldine Talley, Katherine Massey, Pearl Young, Andre Mackniel, Heyward Patterson, Ruth Whitfield, Roberta Drury, Margus Morrison and Aaron Salter. Every one of the ten was Black, and the state indictment, the federal indictment and the Justice Department's later death notice all rest on the same allegation: that they were chosen because of their race.
Three other people survived with serious injuries. The charges that concern them were brought as attempted murder in the state case and as hate crimes involving an attempt to kill in the federal one.
Gendron was taken into custody in Buffalo on May 14, 2022, and held there. On June 1 an Erie County grand jury returned a 25-count indictment. The first count was domestic terrorism motivated by hate, the first time a case had been brought under that New York law. Behind it came ten counts of first-degree murder, ten more of second-degree murder as a hate crime, three of attempted second-degree murder as a hate crime, one for each of the people who were injured, and a single count of criminal possession of a weapon in the second degree.
He was arraigned the next day, June 2, before a judge of Erie County Court. A plea of not guilty was entered to all 25 counts, and the judge ordered him held without bail. The case was set down for a further appearance on July 7. The terrorism count alone carried life imprisonment without parole on conviction.
The plea came on Monday, November 28, 2022. It was entered in a county courthouse about two miles from where the ten had died, in a hearing that lasted about 45 minutes. Gendron, in handcuffs and an orange jumpsuit, showed little emotion. As the judge read out the name of each of the ten people who had been killed and asked whether he had killed that person because of their race, he answered yes and guilty.
He pleaded guilty to 15 counts in all, among them the domestic terrorism count, ten counts of first-degree murder and the counts that concerned the three survivors. Because the terrorism count by itself required life without parole, the plea fixed the outcome of the state case before sentencing began. He was 19.
The plea did not touch the federal case. He had pleaded not guilty to the federal charges, and the Justice Department had not yet said whether it would seek his execution.
He was sentenced in Erie County Court on Wednesday, February 15, 2023. Because he had been 18 at the time of the killings, there had been a question whether he might be treated as a youthful offender; the judge rejected that possibility outright. Before the sentence was pronounced he read a short statement. In it he admitted that he had killed people because they were Black, said he had acted out of hate after believing what he read online, said he regretted it and said he did not want anyone to be inspired by him.
The judge then imposed life without parole on each of the ten murder counts and 25 years for each of the three people he had injured, for an aggregate sentence of life without parole plus 90 years. New York has no death penalty, so that was the most severe sentence the state could impose.
The federal case began on June 15, 2022, with a criminal complaint filed in the Western District of New York under the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, about a month before the indictment. On July 14, 2022, a federal grand jury returned a 27-count indictment, and the Justice Department announced it the same day.
Fourteen counts were hate crimes under 18 U.S.C. section 249(a)(1)(B): ten counts of a hate crime resulting in death, one for each of the dead; three counts of a hate crime involving an attempt to kill, one for each of the three people who were injured; and one count alleging that he attempted to kill other people who were present. The other 13 counts were brought under 18 U.S.C. sections 924(c) and 924(j). The indictment also carried special findings alleging that he had acted after substantial planning and premeditation to commit an act of terrorism. The hate crime counts carried a maximum of life imprisonment or death, and the decision whether to ask for death was left to the attorney general. He pleaded not guilty.
The case was assigned to a United States district judge in Buffalo. Gendron, who was already serving the state sentence, was held by the United States Marshals Service while the federal proceedings went on.
On Friday, January 12, 2024, the government filed formal notice in federal court in Buffalo that it would seek the death penalty. The notice applied to counts 11 through 20, the ten arms-law counts tied to the ten deaths. It was the first new capital prosecution authorized by the attorney general then in office.
The notice set out the aggravating factors the government intended to prove at a penalty hearing. Four came from the list in the federal death penalty statute: that he knowingly created a grave risk of death to people other than the victims, that he acted after substantial planning and premeditation, that a victim was particularly vulnerable because of age and infirmity, and that he intentionally killed or tried to kill more than one person in a single criminal episode. Three more were factors of the government's own drafting: the effect of the crimes on the people who survived them, his racist motive, and his alleged hope of inciting further violence by others.
Before and after the notice, his lawyers said he would plead guilty to the federal indictment if the government agreed not to seek his execution. The government refused.
The federal docket filled up with motions. On June 10, 2024, the defense filed two that went to the heart of the government's case for death. The first asked the court to bar a death sentence because he had been 18 at the time of the killings, pointing to research showing that the brain, and above all the parts that govern decision-making, goes on developing into the early twenties. The second argued that capital punishment would be unconstitutional in his case under the Fifth and Eighth Amendments. At that point the trial was set for September 2025.
It did not start then. In April 2025 the defense asked for a full year's delay, until September 2026, citing about four terabytes of digital discovery and a comparison with 15 other federal capital trials of the previous 20 years, in which defense lawyers had averaged 53 months to prepare against the 39 they had been given here. The prosecution answered that more than 1,000 days had passed since the killings and that the defense had what it needed. On April 10, 2025, the judge moved the jury questionnaires from September to October 2025, made clear he would not grant a year, and set September 15 as the deadline for any notice of an insanity defense. The opening did slip, from September 2025 to January 2026, but not by a year. The defense came back with a narrower request, that the trial begin on or after June 1, 2026, so that the penalty phase would not run into the fourth anniversary of the killings and the coverage that would come with it.
Another defense motion asked the court to take death off the table because, it said, prosecutors had used the grand jury to gather material that had nothing to do with the charges, including questions about his learning, physical, emotional or mental disabilities and whether he seemed racist. The district judge denied it, finding that the defense had not shown that the grand jury questioning had influenced the attorney general's decision to authorize a capital prosecution.
A motion to dismiss Count 27, the attempted-killing count concerning other people present, was argued in March 2025. At a hearing on July 16, 2025, the judge set a new date: the trial would open with in-person jury selection on August 17, 2026, instead of January 5, 2026. The delay followed the government's long deliberation over whether to seek death, changes in the defense team and the defense's constitutional challenges, and the new schedule let a newly added defense lawyer with capital-case experience take part from the start, including the jury questionnaires. Discovery disputes had been settled through mediation, and the lawyers were given until November 10 to file any motion to change the venue. Expert hearings set for May 2025 were postponed, and evidentiary hearings on the defense's age-based claim under Roper v. Simmons, set for February 19 to 26, 2026, were canceled.
In 2025 the district court ruled on the three factors the government had drafted itself, and struck all of them. It gave a separate reason for each. The effect on survivors was out because only the deaths were capital crimes, so evidence about the people who lived was, in the court's view, not relevant to the sentence. The racist motive was out because federal law forbids a capital jury to consider the race of the defendant or of the victims, and the court read the factor as asking the jury to do exactly that. The hope of inciting others was out because the court treated the statements behind it as speech protected by the First Amendment, relying on Brandenburg v. Ohio.
The government appealed under 18 U.S.C. section 3731.
On July 27, 2026, a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit reversed on every point, in a unanimous opinion with no separate concurrence or dissent. Because the federal case had not been tried, the panel took the allegations from the criminal complaint and its supporting affidavit and treated them as true for the purposes of the appeal.
On jurisdiction, the court read section 3731 broadly. Striking a factor kept the government from offering evidence to prove it, and that counted as an order excluding evidence even if some of the same material might come in for other purposes.
On the survivors, the panel held that the statute's list of factors is illustrative and not exhaustive, since it says only that a notice "may include" them, and that the harm done to the people who lived bears on the individual circumstances of the crime the jury must weigh. On incitement, it held that the factor targets motive, that a defendant's own words can be used as evidence of motive, and that the First Amendment does not protect violence: the government would be punishing the conduct alleged, not the speech. On racist motive, it held that a jury can weigh a defendant's racial hatred without weighing anyone's race, because words such as bias, hatred and animus describe a state of mind. Any risk of confusion, the court said, should have been met with a limiting instruction, not by striking the factor.
It sent the case back with directions for that instruction. Jurors are to be told that neither the defendant's race nor the victims' race may play any part in the decision on death, that the factor refers only to a generic racist motive, and that they may consider his generalized hatred and its role in the killings but not the particular people who were targeted. The government had proposed such an instruction itself as an alternative to striking the factor.
The question of where the trial would be held took two rulings. The defense, citing the publicity the case had drawn and its concern about a jury pool that might not be diverse, asked to move the trial out of the Western District of New York, pointing to the Oklahoma City bombing trial, which had been moved. On February 13, 2026, the court ruled that the trial would stay in the district and would not go to Manhattan. On March 10, 2026, the district judge refused the defense's fallback request to move it from Erie County to Monroe County, which would have put it in Rochester. He acknowledged that picking a jury in Buffalo might take longer, but concluded that an impartial one could be found there.
About 3,000 preliminary questionnaires went out in 2026. In June 2026 about 1,200 people who had filled in an initial questionnaire were summoned to the federal courthouse in Buffalo for a longer screening, with the aim of narrowing the pool to several hundred. Gendron turned 23 the following week.
On July 30, 2026, three days after the appeals court ruled, jury selection was moved from August 17 to October 13. Lawyers on both sides were still negotiating which experts could examine Gendron and what tests they could run; the defense had retained a psychiatrist, a psychiatric neurologist and a speech pathologist, and any testing by the government's experts was limited to rebutting the defense's findings. Selection was expected to take six to eight weeks, and the guilt and penalty phases about a month each. On September 8, 2026, the district judge refused a defense request for a dozen more peremptory challenges and gave the prosecution an extra week to make its disclosure about the expected testimony of an FBI agent more specific. By then more than 500 of the juror questionnaires had been struck or dismissed, and selection was to be held only on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays.
The day before it began, on October 12, the defense filed a motion to dismiss the federal indictment, arguing that Black residents were systematically underrepresented in the jury pool and that the effect of the killings on Buffalo's Black community could make the imbalance worse during selection. As of the next afternoon, no ruling had been announced.
Jury selection began on Tuesday, October 13, 2026, about two months later than the August date. The judge first questioned the prospective jurors in groups of 12, asking whether they had learned anything new about the case since June and whether they had any connection to either side, and then one at a time, mostly about what they had read or seen of the case and their views on capital punishment, including whether they could weigh aggravating and mitigating circumstances. On the first day he denied a defense challenge to one prospective juror over whether he could fairly consider mitigating evidence. Prospective jurors were questioned by the judge and the lawyers, including their views on the death penalty, and the judge told them the process would take several weeks. Twelve jurors and six alternates are to be seated. Gendron sat at the defense table without shackles.
His lawyers do not dispute his guilt. Their aim, they said, is to keep him from being sentenced to death, and if he is convicted they intend to offer mitigating evidence, which they have not described in public. The evidence was tentatively expected to begin in December, prospective jurors were to learn in November or early December whether they had been chosen, and they were asked to stay available through the end of February 2027.
Gendron is serving the sentence of life without parole imposed in Erie County Court, and he was held in federal custody for the trial. As of October 13, 2026, jury selection was under way in the United States District Court in Buffalo, and no federal verdict had been reached.
The state conviction rests on section 490.28 of the New York Penal Law, domestic act of terrorism motivated by hate in the first degree, a class A-I felony. The offense requires an intent to kill or seriously injure five or more people, chosen wholly or substantially because of a perceived characteristic such as race or color, whether or not the perception is correct; the death of at least one person who was not a participant, and the killing or attempted killing of four or more others, in the same criminal transaction; and an offender older than 18 at the time. The statute requires life imprisonment without parole, whatever any other provision of law may say. The Erie County indictment of June 2022 was the first case brought under it.
The federal charges are allegations. Gendron has pleaded not guilty to all 27 counts and has not been tried on them; the facts the Second Circuit relied on came from the criminal complaint and were assumed to be true only for the appeal. The defense has said it will not contest guilt, and its concession is not a verdict.
The three non-statutory aggravating factors remain in dispute in the sense that the courts divided over them: the district court struck all three, and the court of appeals restored all three. Whether any of them is proved is a question for the jury at a penalty hearing, if there is one.
The defense's motion to dismiss the indictment over the makeup of the jury pool, filed on October 12, 2026, had not been ruled on as of October 13, 2026.
The defense also raised a challenge under Roper v. Simmons tied to his age, 18 at the time of the killings. Evidentiary hearings on it were set for February 2026 and canceled, and the case went to jury selection with the government still seeking death.
May 14, 2022: Ten people are killed and three seriously injured in Buffalo, New York; Gendron, 18, is arrested the same day.
June 1, 2022: An Erie County grand jury returns a 25-count indictment, the first case brought under New York's law on domestic terrorism motivated by hate.
June 2, 2022: He is arraigned in Erie County Court, pleads not guilty and is held without bail.
June 15, 2022: A federal criminal complaint is filed in the Western District of New York.
July 14, 2022: A federal grand jury returns a 27-count indictment of hate crime and arms counts.
November 28, 2022: He pleads guilty in Erie County Court to 15 counts, including domestic terrorism motivated by hate and ten counts of first-degree murder.
February 15, 2023: He is sentenced to life without parole plus 90 years; youthful offender treatment is rejected.
January 12, 2024: The government files notice that it will seek the death penalty on counts 11 through 20.
June 10, 2024: The defense files motions to bar a death sentence because of his age and as unconstitutional.
March 12, 2025: A defense motion to dismiss Count 27 is argued.
April 10, 2025: The district judge refuses a one-year delay and moves the jury questionnaires to October 2025.
July 16, 2025: The trial is reset to open with jury selection on August 17, 2026, instead of January 5, 2026.
2025: The district court strikes the government's three non-statutory aggravating factors.
February 13, 2026: The court rules that the trial will stay in the Western District of New York.
February 2026: Evidentiary hearings on a Roper v. Simmons claim are canceled.
March 10, 2026: The district judge refuses to move the trial to Rochester.
June 15, 2026: About 1,200 prospective jurors are summoned to Buffalo for further screening.
July 27, 2026: The Second Circuit reverses and restores all three non-statutory aggravating factors.
July 30, 2026: Jury selection is moved from August 17 to October 13.
September 8, 2026: A defense request for a dozen more peremptory challenges is refused.
October 12, 2026: The defense moves to dismiss the indictment over the makeup of the jury pool.
October 13, 2026: Jury selection begins in the United States District Court in Buffalo.