Dylann Roof

The Supreme Court has rejected an appeal from Dylann Roof, who challenged his death sentence and conviction in the 2015 racist slayings of nine members of a Black South Carolina congregation. Roof had asked the court to decide how to handle disputes over mental illness-related evidence between capital defendants and their attorneys. The justices did not comment Tuesday in turning away the appeal. Roof fired his attorneys and represented himself during the sentencing phase of his capital trial, part of his effort to block evidence potentially portraying him as mentally ill. Roof shot participants at a Bible study session at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina.

Attorneys for the U.S. Justice Department say the nation's highest court shouldn't review the case of convicted church shooter Dylann Roof. Federal prosecutors made that argument in an expected filing with the U.S. Supreme Court. Roof was sentenced to death after his conviction in the 2015 racist slayings of nine members of a Black South Carolina congregation. His lawyers have appealed his case to the high court, asking justices to decide how to handle disputes over mental illness-related evidence between capital defendants and their attorneys. Government attorneys say Roof wasn't entitled to "control his counsel's strategy" for winning his case "by dictating the mitigation evidence that they could introduce."

Attorneys for convicted church shooter Dylann Roof have asked the U.S. Supreme Court to decide how to handle disagreements over mental illness-related evidence between capital defendants and their attorneys. Authorities have said Roof opened fire during a 2015 Bible study at Mother Emanuel AME Church, killing nine members of the Black South Carolina congregation. Roof fired his legal team and represented himself at sentencing, purportedly to keep jurors from hearing evidence about his mental health. His attorneys say other courts would have allowed Roof to keep his attorneys while ensuring they didn't present evidence he didn't want. Last year, an appellate panel unanimously upheld Roof's conviction and death sentence. The government's response is due by the end of the month.

Families of nine victims killed in a racist attack at a Black South Carolina church have reached a settlement with the Justice Department over a faulty background check that allowed Dylann Roof to purchase the gun he used in the 2015 massacre. The $88 million deal includes $63 million for the families of the slain and $25 million for survivors of the shooting, was set to be announced Thursday in Washington. Weeks before the church shooting, Roof was arrested by Columbia, South Carolina, police on the drug possession charge. But a series of clerical errors and missteps allowed Roof to buy the handgun he later used in the killings.

A federal judge has concluded that two neo-Nazi group members intended to engage in terrorist activity before FBI agents arrested them ahead of a pro-gun rally in Virginia. U.S. District Judge Theodore Chuang's decision Monday to apply a "terrorism enhancement" in sentencing the men favors prosecutors' recommendation that both of them get 25 years in prison. Chuang is scheduled to sentence them at separate hearings on Thursday in Maryland. Prosecutors say the men planned to carry out a massacre inspired by their white supremacist ideology. Defense lawyers say an undercover FBI agent tried in vain to bait them into developing a plan for violence.

Federal prosecutors in Maryland are recommending 25-year prison sentences for two neo-Nazi group members who were arrested by the FBI ahead of a gun rights rally at Virginia's Capitol. In a court filing Thursday, prosecutors described former Canadian Armed Forces reservist Patrik Jordan Mathews and U.S. Army veteran Brian Mark Lemley Jr. as domestic terrorists who prepared for a civil war and talked about planning an attack at the January 2020 rally in Virginia. Mathews and Lemley Jr. are scheduled to be sentenced on Oct. 28 after pleading guilty to gun charges in June. They were charged along with a third member of The Base, a white supremacist organization. Defense attorneys filed their sentencing memos under seal.

Dylann Roof, the man on federal death row for the racist slayings of nine members of a Black South Carolina congregation in 2015, is making his appellate argument that his conviction and death sentence should be overturned.

The Charleston church killer says his two attorneys "are Jewish and Indian respectively. It is therefore quite literally impossible that they and I could have the same interests relating to my case."

On July 10, 2015, officials removed the Confederate flag that flew on the statehouse grounds. Today, the South Carolina Secessionist Party assembled in…

The second phase of jury selection starts today in the federal trial of Dylann Roof. He’s the white man charged with hate crimes in the shooting deaths of…