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Will the US Supreme Court be interested in any issues being pressed by Charleston church shooter Dylann Roof?

By Douglas Berman

The question in the title of this post was prompted by this new AP article headlined “Dylann Roof takes church shooting appeal to US Supreme Court.”  Here are excerpts:

Attorneys for convicted Charleston church shooter Dylann Roof have asked the U.S. Supreme Court to decide how to handle disagreements over mental illness-related evidence between capital defendants and their attorneys, an issue that has played a role throughout his case over the 2015 racist slayings of nine members of a Black South Carolina congregation.

When a capital defendant who has been ruled competent to stand trial and his attorneys “disagree on whether to present mitigating evidence depicting him as mentally ill, who gets the final say?” Roof’s appellate team wrote in their petition, filed late last month with the high court.  Justices’ consideration is “needed to resolve a deep divide among the lower courts over who — client or lawyer — gets to decide whether mitigation evidence will be introduced at a capital penalty hearing.”

Roof’s self-representation and desire to block any evidence potentially portraying him as mentally ill — even if it could have helped him avoid the death penalty — has been a constant part of his case.  During the sentencing phase of his death penalty trial, Roof fired his legal team and opted to represent himself.  This move, his appellate attorneys have written, successfully prevented jurors from hearing evidence about his mental health, “under the delusion” that “he would be rescued from prison by white-nationalists — but only, bizarrely, if he kept his mental-impairments out of the public record.”

Roof made his decision, his team argued in the petition, “after the district court told him that counsel could introduce evidence depicting him as mentally ill over his objection.” But there is a disconnect, his attorneys argued, between how such cases have been handled in the 4th Circuit versus other jurisdictions, where “the vast majority of state and federal courts hold otherwise, leaving this deeply personal choice to a defendant.”

Notably, this AP article is only focused on one of three questions presented in Roof’s recently filed cert petition. Here are all there issues set forth in this document:

1. When a competent capital defendant and his counsel disagree on whether to present mitigating evidence depicting him as mentally ill, who gets the final say?

2. Does the Commerce Clause authorize Congress to regulate an intrastate, noneconomic, violent offense based solely on the defendant’s pre-offense uses of interstate highways, GPS navigation, the Internet, and the telephone?

3. Should federal courts assess legislation enacted under the Thirteenth Amendment using the same tests that apply to legislation enacted under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, where the three Reconstruction Amendments share substantively-identical enforcement provisions?

A few of many prior related posts: