US to demand death for man who killed 10 people in racist supermarket massacre
The Justice Department said in court filings Friday that it would seek to execute the gunman who killed 10 Black people in a racist massacre at a Buffalo supermarket in May 2022. It is the first time that President Biden's administration has sought the death penalty in a new case.
Payton Gendron, the 20-year-old who committed the attack after posting a hate-filled white supremacist manifesto online, had already been sentenced last year to life in prison without the possibility of parole on state charges. He had pleaded guilty to 10 counts of first-degree murder and a single charge domestic terrorism motivated by hatred.
The federal government has charged Mr. Gendron with hate crime and weapons charges that could carry the death penalty.
Prosecutors said in the filing Friday that the circumstances of the charges were “such that, in the event of a conviction, a death sentence is warranted.”
The decision marks the first time Attorney General Merrick B. Garland has personally authorized the death penalty in a new case since taking office in March 2021.
Austin Sarat, a professor of law and political science at Amherst College who has long written critically about the death penalty, said the Biden administration has shown “consistent inconsistency” in its actions on federal death penalty cases.
Mr. Biden is the first president to openly oppose the death penalty, Mr. Sarat said. But Mr. Garland has the final say on whether the death penalty should be sought in federal prosecutions. And the Justice Department's decisions under Mr. Garland were “very difficult to follow,” Mr. Sarat said.
Former President Donald J. Trump resumed carrying out the federal death penalty after a nearly two-decade hiatus, even as the overall number of executions in the United States fell. The federal government has executed 13 people in Trump's last year, including three in the final days of his presidency.
Mr. Biden campaigned on ending the federal death penalty, vowing to suspend federal executions and urging states to follow suit as he took office in 2021. That year, the Justice Department, under Mr. Garland, imposed a moratorium on federal executions.
But even with a pause in executions themselves, the Justice Department has taken a mixed approach to imposing death sentences. Early in the Biden administration, the Justice Department withdrew requests for the death penalty in seven cases.
But in the case of Sayfullo Saipov, Mr. Garland denied the defense's request to halt the execution of the death penalty if the trial ended in a conviction. After the conviction of Mr. Saipov, who drove a pickup truck along a Manhattan bike path in 2017, killing eight people, a jury deadlocked on the death penalty and imposed a life sentence.
In contrast, the jury that deliberated the case of Robert Bowers, who murdered 11 worshipers in their Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018, unanimously returned a death sentence last year. Mr. Garland has not withdrawn the request for the death penalty in that case.
The Justice Department has also “stubbornly” fought appeals filed by people on federal death row, Mr. Sarat said. The administration's inconsistency has disappointed many opponents of the death penalty, he said.
“They were hopeful that the government would take a final decision against the death penalty,” Sarat said.
Months before the massacre, Mr. Gendron, an outspoken white supremacist, began writing about his plans for an attack in Buffalo in a private diary on the messaging site Discord. In May 2022, Mr. Gendron, then 18 years old, traveled from his home in Conklin, N.Y., about 200 miles to East Buffalo to carry out the attack.
At least twice before the massacre, he visited Tops Friendly Market in Buffalo's Masten Park neighborhood, an area he had singled out in online writings for its large black population.