White Supremacist Church Shooter Dylann Roof Wants To Fire Jewish Lawyer
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.
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 pink@forward.com or on Twitter, @aidenpink.
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.
Now more than ever, American Jews need independent news they can trust, with reporting driven by truth, not ideology. We serve you, not any ideological agenda.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and the protests on college campuses.
Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.
Make a gift of any size and become a Forward member today. You’ll support our mission to tell the American Jewish story fully and fairly.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
