Saturday, January 13, 2024 – Federal prosecutors will seek the death penalty against a white supremacist who killed 10 Black people at a Buffalo supermarket.
Payton Gendron, 20, is already serving a sentence of life in
prison with no chance of parole after he pleaded guilty to state charges of
murder and hate-motivated domestic terrorism in the 2022 attack.
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.
The decision marks the first time that President Joe Biden’s
Justice Department has authorized a new pursuit of the death penalty.
Gendron drove more than 200 miles from his home in rural
Conklin, New York, to a Tops Friendly Market in Buffalo’s largely Black East
Side neighborhood, where he shot eight supermarket customers, the store
security guard and a church deacon who drove shoppers to and from the store
with their groceries. Three people were wounded but survived.
In court papers announcing the decision to seek the death
penalty, Trini Ross, the U.S. attorney for western New York, cited the
substantial planning that went into the shooting, including the choice of
location, which she said was meant to “maximize the number of Black victims.”
Relatives of the victims, who ranged in age from 32 to 86, have expressed mixed views on whether they thought federal prosecutors should pursue the death penalty. Mark Talley, whose 63-year-old mother, Geraldine Talley, was killed, said he “wasn’t necessarily disappointed” by the decision, even if he would have preferred Gendron spend his life behind bars.
“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,” Talley said.
In a joint statement, attorneys for some of victims’
relatives said the decision “provides a pathway to both relief and a measure of
closure for the victims and their families.”
An attorney for Gendron, Sonya Zoghlin, said she was “deeply
disappointed” by the government’s decision to seek the death penalty, noting
that her client was 18 at the time of the shooting.
“Rather than a prolonged and traumatic capital prosecution,
the efforts of the federal government would be better spent on combatting the
forces that facilitated this terrible crime, including easy access to deadly
weapons and the failure of social media companies to moderate the hateful
rhetoric and images that circulate online,” Zoghlin said in a statement.
Gendron carried out his attack on May 14, 2022, using a
semi-automatic marked with racial slurs and phrases including “The Great
Replacement,” a reference to a conspiracy theory that there’s a plot to
diminish the influence of white people.
Prosecutors met Friday with several family members of
victims before the decision to seek the death penalty was made public.
Pamela Pritchett, whose 77-year-old mother, Pearl Young, was
killed in the attack, said the mood was somber.
“I will be scarred. Everybody, every family, the community
of the East Side, we’re all gonna be scarred,” she said. “For me, my goal is to
look at the scar and know that I am healed.”
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