Dylann Roof Case Study

On June 7, 1998, 49-year-old James Byrd Jr. of Texas accepted a ride from three white men, who then beat him severely, urinated on him, chained him by his ankles to the back of their pick-up truck, dragged him for three miles into the countryside, and dumped his corpse in front of an African-American cemetery (Graczyk). A little over a year later, a jury sentenced ring leader John King to death by lethal injection (“Man Executed for Dragging Death of James Byrd”). While this particular case may give the appearance that perpetrators of hate crimes receive appropriate punishment, almost a decade later, one particular case demonstrates the inequity in the application of hate crime punishments: In 2007, Sean Kennedy of Charleston, South

Case Summary. The Oklahoma City Bomber: Timothy McVeigh. Mass murderer, Timothy McVeigh committed the largest crime involving mass murder in the history of America by the Oklahoma City Bombing that took the lives of a total of 168 people. During the Spring of April in 1995, A rental truck from Ryder drove into a federal building parking lot known as Alfred P. Murrah.

On the evening of June 17 2015, a group of twelve black church members accepted a stranger into their bible study. The stranger sat with the Bible study group for about 45 minutes, and then during the final prayer, when everyone's eyes were closed, he pulled out a gun and started firing. Dylann Roof killed nine of the twelve people present, only three survived. He was convicted of 33 federal charges, including hate crimes, obstruction of religion and firearms charges. He has just recently been sentenced to death. Roof decided to defend himself and called on no witnesses and did not produce any evidence for his case. He did not even ask jurors to spare his life. The prosecution however called around 38 witnesses, including family and friends

Bang, bang this was the noise the crowd heard in the Methodist Episcopal Church after Dylann Roof fired his firearm. In the article from the New York Times on July 10, 2015 “Background Check Flaw Let Dylann Roof Buy Gun F.B.I Says” was written by Micheal S. Schimidt. Too many people can easily walk into stores that sells gun and get one with minimal wait time.

The young man accused of the terrible crime was a bug-eyed boy with a bowl haircut who came from a broken home and attended at least seven schools in nine years. Many afternoons, he would sit silently on the curb in front of his roomy yard and, when he tired of it, move to a different curb. He helped neighbors with their yard work, but they still found him strange.

Dylan Roof's actions in South Carolina should be regarded as an act of terrorism. The acts themselves were not only planned to install fear into the public but, to create a greater divide between races. In the months leading up to the attacks Dylan increasingly withdrew from society and started to adopt more and more radical behavior. A blog he ran stated that one of the purposes of the attack was to start a race war. In addition, Charleston was picked for the target city because it had one of the highest ratios of African Americans to Whites. The attack alone may not be a form of domestic terrorism however, the motives behind the attack certainly push it into that category.

On June 17, 2015, nine people were killed while at a prayer meeting at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church of Charleston, South Carolina, one of America’s oldest black churches. Dylann Roof, a 21-year-old white man, opened fire over the congregation after attending the service for approximately an hour. The victims include Rev. Clementa Pinckney, South Carolina’s state senator, and his sister, in addition to five other women and two men. The shooting is considered by most to have been a racially fueled hate crime, as its perpetrator has a history of racism over social media. Immediately before pulling the trigger, Roof was overheard saying, “I have to do it. You rape our women, and you are taking over our country. And you have to

Dylann Roof, a 21-year-old murderer of nine, was arrested for his crimes in June. According to many Roof was just a very confused and mentally ill young man, but surprisingly he was completely sane when he committed these murders. When asked about his reasoning behind his actions, Roof had this to say, “The event that truly awakened me was the Trayvon Martin case... this prompted me to type in the words ‘black on White crime’ into Google, and I have never been the same since that day. The first website I came to was the Council of Conservative Citizens. There were pages upon pages of these brutal black on White murders...At this moment I realized that something was very wrong. How could the news be blowing up the Trayvon Martin case while hundreds of

Week three I wrote about a shooting that took place in Dallas, Texas when gunshots were fired killing five police officers. It concluded with the gunman, 25 year-old Micah Xavier Johnson of Mesquite, Texas, being shot dead by the Dallas police after attempted negotiations failed. Videos showing two men shot by police in both Louisiana and Minnesota created protests in Dallas and lead to erupting fire. The gunman's house was warranted to search; bomb-making materials, ballistic vests, rifles, ammunition, and a personal journal of combat tactics were all found. The amount of shooters were unknown, but when the shooting started twenty protesters that had been carrying rifles scattered the area. It was a very well thought-out attack that took

Dylann Roof will face the death penalty. Roof is accused of killing nine people during a Bible study on July 17 at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. Prosecutors are trying to get Roof the death penalty because he has killed more than two people, and other lives were put into risks. Prosecutors also mentioned that Roof does not feel any remorse for the killings that he committed. Roof also have some federal charges, this includes: hate crimes and obstruction of the practice of religion.

Dylann Roof, killer of nine innocent people, was taken into custody two weeks ago Thursday morning. Some would say God forgives him, and some would like to strike back. Dylann walked into a bible study and shot three men and six women, in order to start a ‘race war’. It was his belief that white people should stand with their own, and war against other colors.

Emmett Louis Till was born on July 25, 1941 in Chicago, Illinois. He was a gentle, loving child according to his mother. She’d said “He was really neat about he’s appearance, He also love cooking and told his mother that he wanted to be a motorcycle police officer.” Emmett Till was on this earth for fourteen years before his life was tragically torn from beneath him.

Shah, K., Hanna, J., Shoichet, C. E., & Savidge, M. (2017, January 10). Dylann roof jury: Death

Dylan and Eric were two very disturbed boys. Dylan Klebold was considered depressed, detectives found a journal of his that had considerably dark things written inside. “People are so unaware. . . . well, Ignorance is bliss I guess. . . . that would explain my depression.” A lot of misinformation was circulated and treated as facts before anyone had seen the diary themselves. It was nearly impossible to decipher truth from fiction; like many other aspects of this tragedy, figuring everything out would take years. Their diaries were found only a couple of days after the shootings in thorough searches of the boys' houses and lockers.

While the topic can be overwhelming and complex, it is important to study the racist institution of the death penalty because execution is the ultimate expression of which individuals are valued by our society and which are considered dispensable. What the US expresses through its executions carries some racist undertones when we look at the races of the persons being executed, but it takes on a clearly racial direction when we consider the race of the original murder victim. For example, "the most comprehensive study of the death penalty found that killers of whites were eleven times more likely to be condemned to death than killers of African- Americans."3 On the flip side, "only 31 of the over 18,000 executions in this country's history involved a white person being punished for killing a Black person."4 In capital punishment, we find the modernday counterpart to lynching. Of course, lynching often meant sporadic acts of individual racism. Selective killing today is an official, bureaucratized act of the state and therefore an official statement of what our government stands for. And what the government stands for is the most complete disempowerment possible - death - for a large number of Black individuals.