Defense seeks mistrial in church shooting case

Prosecutors say Roof targeted the historic church because he wanted to start a race war.

A survivor of last year’s massacre at a black SC church testified Wednesday that her Bible study group had just closed their eyes and started praying when a loud sound shattered the stillness. She opened with describing several of the victims: the Rev. Daniel Simmons was the backbone of the church, one who always saw to it that the Bible study was organized, even when he was ailing; Ethel Lee Lance, at 70, had a walk about her, a swagger; Cynthia Hurd, whose name caused Sanders to pause with regret.

“They totally gave the back of their hand to miners”, said Sen. And Debbie, I understand it was actually a rather dramatic day of opening testimony, and a survivor took the witness stand.

The survivor, Felicia Sanders, told the racially diverse jurors about the horror of seeing her son and her aunt shot and killed.

Then Roof shot Sanders repeatedly, Richardson said, according to WCIV. Sanders said she moved her legs through the growing pools of blood coming from her dying son and aunt so the gunman would see blood on her and think that they, too, were dead.

As she lay there, her son, Tywanza, was on one side of her and Jackson, her aunt, was on the other, both of them shot.

She said the last text he sent was to ask her: “Are we having bible study?”

At one point, she looked across the courtroom toward Roof and called him ‘evil, evil, evil’.

Roof sat with his head looking down at the defense table during the testimony.

The organization has taken fairly more than 200 government the death penalty cases to trial since 1988, as showed by the Federal Death Penalty Resource Counsel Project.

Lead prosecutor in the case, Jay Richardson, in arguing against the motion, said Sanders’ words did not go to the penalty, but instead that the defendant would find himself in hell, no matter his manner of death.

Roof left three people alive in the church basement so that they could tell the world his reasons for the shooting, police said.

In court, Roof’s defense team told jurors their client is guilty of killing the nine people at Emanuel AME.

Roof’s “racism, his violence, his assault on a house of worship won’t prevail in this courtroom”, the prosecutor said.

The second day of testimony in Roof’s trial began Wednesday morning after the judge in the case denied a defense request for a mistrial, the Post and Courier reported.

Police lead Dylann Roof into the courthouse in Shelby, N.C., on June 18, 2015. U.S. District Judge Richard Gergel agreed.

Roof, who was 21 at the time, entered the Emanuel AME Church armed and “with the intent of killing African-Americans engaged in the exercise of their religious beliefs”, according to the federal indictment against him.

Jurors in the federal trial of a man accused of killing nine people in a black SC church in 2015 saw surveillance footage Thursday that allegedly showed Dylann Roof entering the church and leaving again after the mass shooting. Prosecutors have refused. Roof faces another death penalty trial next year in state court.

Roof, who is white, is charged with killing nine black parishioners at the church in an attempt to start a race war. He’s also likely to face a state trial on nine counts of murder.

The federal jury selection process began last summer when about 3,000 potential jurors received jury summonses.

The man accused of murdering nine black people in a SC church previous year is “evil, evil, evil”, a tearful survivor said as the trial began.

“He is evil. There is no place for him except the pit of hell”, said Sanders, who was the first witness to testify in Roof’s federal death penalty trial on Wednesday, according to The New York Times.

Roof killed all but three churchgoers in the twisted shooting..