Racist US church killer Dylann Roof said he’d rather die than be known as autistic, records reveal
Roof’s appeal against execution is rejected, as psychological records are released
Dylann Roof had his first appeal of his death sentence for killing nine people in a racist attack on praying worshippers in a Charleston church rejected Wednesday by the same judge who presided at his trial.
US District Judge Richard Gergel also ordered the release of hundreds of pages of Dylann Roof’s psychological records.
They included Roof’s insistence he would rather die than have an autism diagnosis made public and he wanted a federal trial so his picture — and what he thought was his unusually large forehead — would be kept off television.
In his first appeal, Roof argued that his crime didn’t fit the definition of interstate commerce needed to make a federal case because he bought the gun and bullets in South Carolina and did not travel out-of-state to the church.
But Gergel ruled Roof used a telephone to call the church, GPS to find it and the bullets and gun were manufactured in a different state.
