Dylann Roof, convicted murderer of the #CharlestonNine at Emanuel AME, is as much of a sickening white supremacist Nazi as any swastika-carrying “alt-right” tweeter on the Internet. And in addition to this fact, Assistant US Attorney Nathan Williams is strongly advocating for the judge to give Roof the death penalty. Williams has called witnesses to the stand, most of them being family of the victims, as well as presenting journal entries showing Roof’s unrepentant (and more importantly, he was acting in his own clear mind and conscious) racism. As of this writing, the sentencing trial has yet to finish and it is unlikely that if the death penalty is given, it would be carried out within the next year.

These reprehensible and immoral realities being known, executing Roof would be a serious mistake.

To be clear, I am not defending the actions of this Nazi scum - indeed, Roof would be unsafe outside of prison for many of us leftists who would looking to retaliate for his transgressions against our black comrades and the AME congregation in Charleston, especially for those of us who feel as though Roof has made the work of undoing the evils of slavery’s legacy in Charleston an even more difficult and monumental task. There are a number of reasons why I and many on the Left oppose the death penalty in general, but the rise of Trump and the far right in Amerikkka escalates the danger of executing Roof by a significant measure. First, I think the reason Roof gave little defense of himself in his testimony to the jury and asked them to “forget” what his lawyers said during his defense is specifically because he is goading both the prosecutor and the court of public opinion into giving him the death penalty. It would be no great stretch of the imagination to see Nazis and Trump supporters claiming Roof as a martyr of #WhiteGenocide in the near future. As a primary motivation in sentencing Roof to life in prison, it would be to deny him the infamy he desires in order to avoid giving white supremacists a rallying symbol.

I find it disturbing that there is unquestioned authority of the Amerikkkan State in executing people convicted in our courts of law, considering that most legal decisions are heavily weighted by factors of race, class, and gender. For example, information provided by the Death Penalty Information Center, a nonprofit tracking implementation of state execution in the United States, “According to a recently updated study by Professor Katherine Beckett of the University of Washington, jurors in Washington "were four and one half times more likely to impose a sentence of death when the defendant was black than [] they were in cases involving similarly situated white defendants.” An Oregon non profit also shows that impoverished defendants are also more likely to be subjected to the death penalty because they cannot afford proper legal defense. I stand with the American Civil Liberties Union when they declare, “we believe that the state should not give itself the right to kill human beings – especially when it kills with premeditation and ceremony, in the name of the law or in the name of its people, and when it does so in an arbitrary and discriminatory fashion.”

Disregarding the economic costs of carrying out and maintaining Death Rows nationwide, there is moreover the conflicted feelings of the family members of the victims Dylann Roof murdered. More than a few among them have expressed reluctance for any sort of vengeance in sentencing Roof to death. Esther Lance’s mother, Ethel, was shot by Roof in June of 2015 - initially, she stated, “Yes, I want him to see the death penalty,” but now says her mother “wouldn’t have wanted that.” This argument is not to contribute to the ongoing paternalism that believes black folks should always forgive their oppressors, but rather to point out that there is no consensus in the community as to whether executing Roof would be morally justified.

And ultimately, the consensus of the community should be what determines the fate of scum like Roof, not the rule of “law”, that is often deployed arbitrarily and against marginalized peoples.