Federal prosecutors will seek the death penalty for the white supremacist who killed 10 Black people at a Buffalo supermarket in May 2022.
The US Department of Justice has opted to ask for capital punishment for Payton Gendron, 20, for federal hate crimes, according to a new court filing. He was 19 when he carried out a racist, murderous attack on shoppers in a majority Black area, devastating the upstate New York community.
He was originally sentenced to life in prison last February, after a sentencing hearing at which he was obliged to listen to relatives of his victims express their pain and rage.
The sentencing hearing for Payton Gendron was disrupted when he was charged at by a man in the audience who was quickly restrained.
Gendron, whose hatred was fueled by racist conspiracy theories he encountered online, pleaded guilty in November 2022 to state charges of crimes including murder and domestic terrorism motivated by hate, a charge that carried an automatic life sentence.
New York does not have capital punishment, but the justice department had the option of seeking the death penalty in a separate federal hate crimes case. Gendron had promised to plead guilty in that case if prosecutors agreed not to seek the death penalty.
In a notice announcing the decision to seek the death penalty, Trini Ross, the US attorney for western New York, wrote that Gendron had selected the supermarket “in order to maximize the number of Black victims”.
The notice cited a range of factors for the decision, including the substantial planning leading to the shooting and the decision to target at least one victim who was “particularly vulnerable due to old age and infirmity”.
Genron did not appear at a status conference held in his case on Friday afternoon following news of the filing.
Relatives of the victims had expressed mixed views on whether they thought federal prosecutors should pursue the death penalty. After meeting with prosecutors hours before a Friday hearing in the case, one of the relatives, Mark Talley, shared his thoughts.
“I’m not necessarily disappointed in the decision … It would have satisfied me more knowing he would have spent the rest of his life in prison being surrounded by the population of people he tried to kill,” said Talley, whose 63-year-old mother Geraldine Talley was killed.
The justice department has made federal death penalty cases a rarity since the election of Joe Biden, a Democrat who opposes capital punishment.
This is the first time Merrick Garland, the US attorney general, has authorized a new pursuit of the death penalty. Under his leadership, the justice department has permitted the continuation of two capital prosecutions and withdrawn from pursuing death in more than two dozen cases.
Garland instituted a moratorium on federal executions in 2021 pending a review of procedures. Although the moratorium does not prevent prosecutors from seeking death sentences, the justice department has done so sparingly.
At the time of the supermarket shooting Buffalo, an old rust belt city that sits on Lake Erie on the US-Canadian border, was the sixth-most segregated city and the third poorest in the country.
Black people account for 34% of its population of 255,000. Nearly three-quarters of them live on the city’s east side, according to a 2021 report by the University of Buffalo Center for Urban Studies.
The Associated Press contributed reporting
