Dylann Roof Image by Getty Images

By Aiden Pink September 18, 2017

The white supremacist who was convicted of killing nine people at a South Carolina church has requested that he be allowed to fire his lawyers because one is Jewish and another is Indian-American.

“Because of my political views, which are arguably religious, it will be impossible for me to trust two attorneys that are my political and biological enemies,” Dylann Roof argued in a handwritten three-page note.

Roof shot dead nine African-American members of the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in 2015 because, he said, he wanted to start a race war.

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Roof mailed the letter from a federal prison in Indiana, where he is awaiting the death penalty, pending the exhaustion of his appeals. He was convicted on 33 counts in December 2016 and was given the death penalty the following month.

Roof’s lawyer during that trial, David Bruck, was also Jewish, which Roof complained about in his filing. “[Bruck’s] ethnicity was a constant source of conflict even with my constant efforts to look past it,” he wrote.

Contact Aiden Pink at [email protected] or on Twitter, @aidenpink.

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