White supremacist Dylann Roof on Tuesday appealed his convictions and death sentence in the 2015 massacre of nine black church members in South Carolina, arguing that he was suffering from schizophrenia and other psychological disorders when he represented himself at his capital trial.
In a legal brief filed with the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Roof’s lawyers said that when a judge allowed him to represent himself during the penalty phase of his federal trial, he was a 22-year-old ninth-grade dropout “who believed his sentence didn’t matter because white nationalists would free him from prison after an impending race war.”
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