Update 08/25/2021 2:04pm:

Back in May, Dylann Roof, the man who murdered nine Black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015 appealed his sentence. Now, the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld the death penalty sentence for Roof. 

The court ruling stated, "No cold record or careful parsing of statutes and precedents can capture the full horror of what Roof did. His crimes qualify him for the harshest penalty that a just society can impose." The record added that Roof "confessed, with barely a hint of remorse." 

The ruling added, "Dylann Roof murdered African Americans at their church, during their Bible-study and worship. They had welcomed him. He slaughtered them. He did so with the express intent of terrorizing not just his immediate victims at the historically important Mother Emanuel Church, but as many similar people as would hear of the mass murder. He used the internet to plan his attack and, using his crimes as a catalyst, intended to foment racial division and strife across America. He wanted the widest possible publicity for his atrocities, and, to that end, he purposefully left one person alive in the church 'to tell the story.'" 

Source: WCSC 

Original 05/26/2021 1:30am:

According to reports, Dylann Roof, the man convicted and sentenced to death for murdering nine black churchgoers at a historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina, is appealing his sentence. 

Roof's legal team is appealing the sentence on the basis that the now 27-year-old was "disconnected from reality." Roof told authorities back in 2015 after the slayings that he murdered the nine parishioners to launch a race war. 

"When Dylann Roof represented himself at his capital trial, he was a 22-year-old, ninth-grade dropout diagnosed with schizophrenia-spectrum disorder, autism, anxiety, and depression, who believed his sentence didn't matter because white nationalists would free him from prison after an impending race war," the motion read, in part. 

Despite the appeal, Roof expressed a lack of remorse for his actions: "I would like to make it crystal clear. I do not regret what I did," he wrote in a journal following the killings. "I am not sorry. I have not shed a tear for the innocent people I killed."

Source: live5news.com