Church Killer Dylann Roof Wants To Fire Jewish Lawyers
Dylann Roof Image by Getty Images
(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.”
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.
