SCRATCHING his ear, sipping water, sometimes chatting with his defence team, Dylann Roof looks for all the world like an ordinary human being, more sullen adolescent than monster. Yet, almost astonishingly, the slight, pockmarked figure who slouches into his chair in the federal courtroom in Charleston—his face averted from the relatives of his victims—is, by his own admission, the man who killed nine people at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church on June 17th last year. Mr Roof’s culpability is not in doubt; the harder question, as often with monsters, is how far he reflects broader pathologies in the society that spawned him.
He has been tried on 33 federal charges because prosecutors rejected his offer to plead guilty in exchange for life imprisonment. Thus far the proceedings may not have bolstered his chances of avoiding a death sentence. The court has heard how, in a delinquent pattern that echoes the online radicalisation of would-be jihadists, his hateful white supremacism was fuelled by an internet search for “black on White crime”. He seems to have completed his own deranged manifesto,...Continue reading
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