COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) – A white supremacist who was sentenced to death in the 2015 massacre of nine black worshippers has told a federal appeals court he wants to fire his appellate attorneys because one of them is Jewish and the other is Indian.
In a handwritten request filed Monday with the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia, Dylann Roof wrote that his attorneys’ backgrounds are “a barrier to effective communication.”
Given their ethnicities, Roof wrote, “it is therefore quite literally impossible that they and I could have the same interests relating to my case.”
“Because of my political views, which are arguably religious, it will be impossible for me to trust two attorneys that are my political and biological enemies,” he added.
Roof, 23, has been on federal death row since earlier this year, after a jury convicted him of dozens of charges including federal hate crimes and obstruction of the practice of religion in the shooting deaths of nine Bible study attendees at Charleston’s Emanuel AME, one of the oldest black churches in the South.