The Department of Justice announced Friday its intention to seek the death penalty in the federal trial of the author of a racist killing which cost the lives of ten African-Americans in 2022 in New York state.
This is a first for the administration of Democratic President Joe Biden, candidate for re-election in November, and who pledged during his 2020 campaign to work to abolish capital punishment at the federal level. .
Payton Gendron, 19, a white supremacist who was 18 at the time of the crime, was sentenced to life in prison in February 2023 by New York State courts after pleading guilty to racist murders and acts of of terrorism.
In the federal prosecution against him for “racist crimes,” prosecutors indicated Friday their intention to seek the death penalty.
They justify their position by the intentional and premeditated nature of the killing, as well as by its racist motivations.
“Payton Gendron’s animosity towards black people played a role in the murders,” they specify, emphasizing that he had chosen the supermarket where he committed them “in order to maximize the number of black victims.”
Since the start of Mr. Biden’s term, the Justice Department has only sought the death penalty twice, but those were proceedings initiated under his Republican predecessor Donald Trump.
His Minister of Justice Merrick Garland also decreed a moratorium on federal executions in May 2021. These are relatively rare in any case, compared to those carried out by States.
On May 14, 2022, after months of preparations, Payton Gendron went in combat gear, armed with an AR-15 type semi-automatic rifle and a camera broadcasting his actions live on the internet, in a supermarket in Buffalo, near the border with Canada.
He had progressed methodically through the parking lot and then into the store, shooting at customers and employees, leaving ten people dead and three injured, almost all of them black.
According to court documents, he had carried out on-site scouting and outlined his plan in a racist and conspiratorial “manifesto”. His goal, he wrote, was to “kill as many black people as possible.”
