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Dylann Roof: ‘I do not regret what I did’

This undated photo that appeared on Lastrhodesian.com, a website investigated by the FBI in connection with Dylann Roof, shows him posing for a photo holding a Confederate flag. Lastrhodesian.com via Associated Press/File

CHARLESTON, S.C. — Sometime in the six weeks after he killed nine Bible study worshipers at this city’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, Dylann S. Roof wrote in a journal that he had “not shed a tear for the innocent people I killed.” On Wednesday morning, standing before the jurors who will decide whether he should be put to death, Roof again offered no apology, no explanation, and no remorse for the horrific massacre.

In a strikingly brief opening statement in the penalty phase of his trial in US District Court, where he is representing himself, Roof repeatedly assured jurors that he was not mentally ill, and left it at that. “There’s nothing wrong with me psychologically,” he said, before striding back to the defense table, taking a deep breath.

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By then, Courtroom No. 6 had already been jarred by a reading of two pages from Roof’s journal, a white supremacist manifesto written in Charleston County’s jail.

“I would like to make it crystal clear I do not regret what I did,” Roof wrote in the journal, which officials seized in August 2015 and a prosecutor introduced during his opening statement. “I am not sorry.”

Roof, who was then 21, also wrote: “I do feel sorry for the innocent white children forced to live in this sick country and I do feel sorry for the innocent white people that are killed daily at the hands of the lower race. I have shed a tear of self-pity for myself. I feel pity that I had to do what I did in the first place. I feel pity that I had to give up my life because of a situation that should never have existed.”

As he began to lay out the government’s case for a death sentence, the prosecutor who read from the journal, Assistant US Attorney Nathan S. Williams, told the jury of 10 women and two men that Roof’s killing spree had been a premeditated act that had devastated the families of his victims.

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“The defendant didn’t stop after shooting one person or two or four or five; he killed nine people,” Williams said, a few moments before he flatly declared: “The death penalty is justified.”

Later, aided by a slideshow of pictures, he described each of the victims and their lives.

The presentations, especially Roof’s comments and the introduction of the journal, struck a startling beginning to the trial’s sentencing phase, which is expected to run into next week. On Dec. 15, after a weeklong first phase, the jury found him guilty of 33 counts, including hate crimes, obstruction of religion resulting in death, and firearms charges. Eighteen counts require the jury to decide whether to sentence Roof, now 22, to either death or life in prison without the possibility of parole. A death sentence requires unanimity.

Although many people in the courtroom had already heard Roof’s raspy, Southern-inflected monotone during the guilt phase of his trial, when prosecutors played a video recording of his confession, his opening statement on Wednesday was the first time he had directly addressed jurors. He chose to allow his court-appointed legal team to represent him during the guilt phase, but sidelined them to represent himself during the penalty phase in order to prevent them from introducing any mitigating evidence regarding his family background of mental capacity.

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His decision to spend only three minutes addressing the jury, and to devote the time to insisting that he was not impaired, seemed to solidify the impression of a man unwilling to rely upon what experts believe is his best opportunity to avoid execution: a mental health defense. He has said he does not plan to call witnesses or present evidence in his behalf.

“The point is that I’m not going to lie to you, not by myself or through somebody else,” said Roof. As his paternal grandparents watched from the second row on the left side of the courtroom, several women left their seats on the right side, which is reserved for family members of the victims, one of them muttering curses.

Roof’s minimalist approach stands in sharp contrast to the strategy of Justice Department officials, who could call more than 30 witnesses to try to depict Roof as remorseless and calculating. The witness list is expected to include at least one survivor of the attack, family members of the victims, and federal law enforcement officials.

Prosecutors began on Wednesday morning with Jennifer Benjamin Pinckney, the widow of the church’s slain pastor, the Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney.

Jennifer Pinckney, who had been married to Clementa Pinckney for 15 years, narrated an affectionate and often lighthearted telling of their life together, illustrated by dozens of photographs of her husband — as young saxophone player in the school band, in a white tuxedo for their wedding, attending the births of their two girls, at family reunions, on Caribbean cruises and trips to Seattle. Often exhausted by his dual schedule as a pastor and state senator, he was shown in several pictures having fallen asleep in the back seat of the family car and on a couch while reading to his daughters.

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She talked of birthday dinners with their daughters — one was partial to Red Lobster’s shrimp and crab legs — and of the night of the killings, when Jennifer Pinckney and a daughter heard the barrage of gunfire while they were waiting at the church.

When Roof had the opportunity to cross-examine Pinckney, he said only, “No questions.”

Roof and his now-sidelined legal team made no effort to contest his guilt across six days of testimony last month, when prosecutors and their witnesses described the killings in gruesome detail.

As Roof’s approach to the penalty phase and the government’s evidence emerged on Wednesday, the proceedings seemed to be a partial reflection of the defendant’s writings, which investigators gathered after the massacre at Emanuel, the oldest African Methodist Episcopal congregation in the South. In the writings, which include a different journal, an online manifesto, and letters to his parents, Roof railed against African-Americans, condemned psychology as “a Jewish invention,” declared that he had acted alone, and made circumscribed expressions of regret, but only for the pain it would cause his family.

Roof, who is also facing a capital prosecution in state court, reluctantly allowed lawyers to represent him during the trial’s guilt phase, but he took control of his defense during jury selection and again on Wednesday for sentencing proceedings. He disregarded Gergel’s warnings that self-representation, permitted under a 1975 ruling by the US Supreme Court, was “a bad idea,” and he did not reverse his decision before the judge’s deadline.

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Defense lawyers, who had intended to mount a defense rooted in Roof’s mental health, pointedly resisted his efforts for weeks but, ultimately, were ordered to serve only as standby counsel, a status that allows them to offer guidance but not to make objections or question witnesses.

Roof’s plans for them to serve a diminished role had become clear by mid-December, when the lead defense lawyer, David I. Bruck, used his closing argument during the trial’s guilt phase to signal to the jury that Roof might be mentally troubled. Lacing his presentation, his last to jurors before sentencing, with words like “delusional,” “abnormal,” and “irrationality,” Bruck portrayed Roof as a loner with no meaningful relationships.

On Wednesday, Roof suggested that jurors disregard Bruck’s statements.