Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Fast Forward

Church Killer Dylann Roof Wants To Fire Jewish Lawyers

(JTA) — Charleston church gunman Dylann Roof, who was sentenced to death for killing nine black worshipers, has told a federal appeals court he wants to fire the attorneys handling his appeal because one is Jewish and the other is Indian.

Roof, a white supremacist whose racial manifesto said the Jewish “problem” would be solved “if we could somehow destroy the Jewish identity,” said in a handwritten request filed Monday with the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Virginia that the attorneys’ ethnic backgrounds are “a barrier to effective communication.”

“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,” he also wrote, the Associated Press reported.

Roof, 23, was convicted on 33 counts including hate crimes, and sentenced to death in January for the June 2015 murders at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. Roof was a committed white supremacist and anti-Semite who wrote a manifesto outlining his views which is full of racist and anti-Semitic rants.

Roof noted in his request that his primary attorney during the original trial, David Isaac Bruck, a noted death penalty lawyer, also was Jewish, and said that Bruck’s “ethnicity was a constant source of conflict even with my constant efforts to look past it.”

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

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.

We’ve set a goal to raise $260,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.

If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

With your support, we’ll be ready for whatever 2025 brings.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.