Ellis Cose

guest columnist

It’s hard to imagine a crime more heinous. On June 17, 2015, Dylann Roof walked into Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, S.C., joined parishioners for Bible study and shot nine of them dead.

Shortly afterward, families of the victims brought the world to tears when they offered Roof forgiveness. Alana Simmons, granddaughter of one of the victims made it plain. “Hate won’t win,” she said. Sharon Risher, whose mother and two cousins died, could not forgive but did not want him dead. “I don’t believe in the death penalty,” she said.

Neither the federal government nor the state of South Carolina agrees. Both seek the death penalty in what may be sequential proceedings. As a local lawyer told me in a moment of dark humor, they can’t kill him twice.

Expressed hatred

Last week, U.S. District Judge Richard Gergel ruled Roof competent to stand trial, and on Monday Roof sought and won permission to represent himself.

In its “notice of intent to seek the death penalty,” the U.S. government argued that Roof had committed horrendous crimes against vulnerable people and expressed hatred of African Americans. “The injury, harm and loss caused by Dylann Storm Roof … is evidenced by … the impact of (each) victim’s death upon his or her family, friends and co-workers,” wrote prosecutors.

Henderson Hill, former director of the Center for Death Penalty Litigation in North Carolina, acknowledges that a death penalty verdict would be “so very easy with these facts.” But he wonders about the wisdom of putting already traumatized families through the ordeal of at least one and possibly two trials just so the state can claim Roof’s scalp.

A majority of blacks in the region feel much the same. A University of South Carolina poll found that 65% of black Americans in South Carolina think Roof should receive life without parole. In contrast, 64% of whites think he should die. Those findings have less to do with Roof than with blacks’ opposition to the death penalty. Whereas 68% of whites favor the death penalty, according to Gallup, only 39% of blacks agree.

It’s not altogether clear why. Pollsters initially assumed the opposition stemmed from “perceived biases in the criminal justice system.” And certainly there are biases. But the pollsters found little evidence for that.

I suspect the answer has something to do with the weight of history alluded to by Hill. Blacks are intimately familiar with this nation’s legacy of lynching, during which people were taken by the mob and killed in the name of justice — and of how dehumanizing that process was to all concerned.

Gang law

Many black neighborhoods also have been decimated by eye-for-an-eye thinking as practiced by gangs. Put another way, black communities have had enough experience with murderous vengeance to know that it almost never leads to anything good. Also, the death penalty has been carelessly applied. As the ACLU has pointed out, between 1973 and 2014 some 150 people were exonerated from death row, hardly a testament to the efficacy of the process.

Rather than offering families Roof’s death, the state should offer them life. It should promise them such a tragedy will not happen again, that no more Americans will have to bear witness to a troubled individual with a gun mowing people down. “Dream on!” cries the voice in my head. “We Americans love our guns.”

That lust for guns is not consistent across races. The Pew Research Center has found that while 61% of whites think protecting gun rights is more important than controlling gun ownership, only 31% and 30% of blacks and Hispanics, respectively, feel that same way. The reason is not difficult to discern.

It is much easier to support any idiot’s right to bear arms if you are reasonably confident you will not be shot. And black men between 20 and 29 are more than four times as likely to be killed by guns as young white men. Most whites who die from guns (77%) kill themselves. For blacks, 82% are homicides.

It’s hard to see how killing Roof offers much relief to even the most beleaguered community. And any relief it offers has to be measured against the reality that the death penalty is somewhat symbolic. A death row inmate typically spends over a decade in prison before being put to death. And it’s very expensive symbolism. The death penalty cases are much more costly than life without parole. Wouldn’t it be great if that energy, time and money could be put into the service of improving lives instead of adding another dead body to the pile?

Ellis Cose, writer in residence for the ACLU and a member of USA TODAY’s Board of Contributors, is the author of The End of Anger and The Rage of a Privileged Class.