Or perhaps the federal government will feel it's worth the extra effort and risk to give him a federal death sentence. It's entirely possible that federal prosecutors could decide to prosecute Roof in federal court for a hate crime and in state court for murder, as rare as that is. "South Carolina may feel they can get convictions and get justice more swiftly for the families of the victims," says Little. (Massachusetts doesn't have the death penalty, so the only option prosecutors had for getting Tsarnaev sentenced to death was taking him to federal court.) There's a whole process a federal prosecutor has to follow just to be allowed to ask the judge for a death sentence - culminating in the greenlight from the attorney general herself. And even then, the process of sentencing someone to death is a lot more straightforward at the state level - federal death penalty cases, as the trial of Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev showed, can be awfully complicated. That puts a lot of pressure on prosecutors to make sure Roof is found guilty of that particular charge. But one of the 33 crimes he's charged with is intentionally destroying religious property because of the race of those who worshiped there - and if death results from that act (as it did in Charleston), someone convicted of that crime can get the death sentence. Roof actually couldn't be sentenced to death on hate crime charges alone. But at the federal level, it's not so straightforward. The murder charges Roof has been hit with in South Carolina are all eligible for the death penalty if he's convicted. It's not yet clear that this will happen in Roof's case, but it's usually how things go.īut if prosecuting Roof in federal court instead of state court makes it possible to charge him with a hate crime, it also has something prosecutors might see as a drawback: It will be harder and more complicated to sentence him to death in federal court. If the federal government files charges of its own, the state usually decides not to pursue its case. But in the meantime, according to Alex Little, a lawyer and former assistant US attorney, it's almost always easier for states to file charges quickly than it is for the federal government to "cobble together a complaint." That's why South Carolina prosecutors filed their charges the day after Roof was arrested, even though the federal government took a few weeks to decide how to proceed. In cases like this, where someone's alleged crime runs afoul of both state and federal law, federal and state prosecutors usually figure out which one of them is in the best position to bring a case to trial, for efficiency's sake. (The verbatim text of the law in question is here.) But the federal government does: It's made willfully killing someone because of his or her race a crime that's punishable with life in federal prison. South Carolina doesn't have a separate law that gives harsher sentences to hate crimes. Roof was already charged at the state level - but not with a hate crime Here's what a federal hate crime prosecution means. But federal officials believe "murder" doesn't really encompass what Roof is accused of doing - especially after the discovery of a white supremacist manifesto on a website that has been traced back to Roof. Roof has already been charged by South Carolina prosecutors with nine counts of murder and one count of possession of a firearm during the commission of a violent crime. On Wednesday, according to Matt Apuzzo of the New York Times, federal prosecutors charged Dylann Roof, the alleged shooter in the June 17 massacre at Charleston's Emanuel AME Church, on 33 counts - including hate crime charges and a charge of destroying or defacing religious property.
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