Church shooter Dylann Roof can’t fire Jewish, Indian lawyers
Dylann Roof enters the courtroom at the Charleston County Judicial Center to enter his guilty plea on murder charges April 10, 2017, in Charleston, South Carolina. Roof, a white supremacist who was sentenced to death in the 2015 massacre of nine black worshippers, has told a federal appeals court he wants to fire his appellate attorneys because one of them is Jewish and the other is Indian. (Grace Beahm/Pool/File/The Post And Courier via AP)
COLUMBIA, S.C. — A federal appeals court has denied white supremacist Dylann Roof’s request to replace his Jewish and Indian lawyers who are appealing his death sentence for a racist massacre in South Carolina a day after he filed it.
The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued a one-page, 11-word denial Tuesday.
Roof’s handwritten appeal was filed Monday. He wrote: “It will be impossible for me to trust two attorneys that are my political and biological enemies.”
Roof was sentenced to death in January after being convicted of hate crimes in the killings of nine black worshippers at Charleston’s Emanuel AME Church in June 2015.
In denying Roof’s requests, the judges wrote: “The court denies the motion for substitution of counsel on appeal.”
