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On Jan. 10, the same jury that had found Roof guilty of the execution-style killings unanimously ruled that he should be executed. Roof presented no witnesses during either phase of the trial and rejected his lawyers’ advice to let them present numerous witnesses and other evidence that would have shown that Roof was severely mentally ill, suffering from obsessive false delusions about African-Americans and the need to establish a new America based on white supremacy.

▪  Roof believes the Judge liked him because “he smiled at him and how the Court’s affection for him will shift the ‘universal consciousness’ in the room in his favor and will impact how other people in court will feel about him.”

▪  Roof said he “does not believe he will be sentenced to death because ‘people aren’t that mean’ and the jurors will like him.”

▪ Roof said that even if he is sentenced to death, he won’t be executed because he is “too special. The defendant said that he can stop the execution by simply crying before they stick the needle in his arm.” (Roof’s lawyers told him that “never in this history of the American death penalty had an execution ever been stopped because the defendant was crying.”)

▪ Roof said he “did not want a young, attractive woman on his jury because this would increase his anxiety.”

▪  Roof didn’t like it when his lawyers objected to prosecution testimony that described Roof as “evil.” Roof “stated that he believed the more witnesses called him evil, the more the jurors would feel sorry for him and vote for life.”

▪ Before closing arguments in the trial’s first phase, Roof told lawyer Stevens that his sweater had been washed with too much detergent and told her, “You are trying to kill me.”

▪  After the trial’s closing arguments in the guilt phase, Roof was “angry at Mr. Bruck for giving a ‘bad’ closing argument.” He told Bruck he should have told the jury to search on the Internet for information about how dangerous black people were to white people.

▪  Roof rejected a defense witness, Father John Parker, an Orthodox priest, because Parker declined to promise that he wouldn’t tell the jury that Roof has mental illness issues.

Documents showed that Roof believed that white supremacists would take over America and he would be discredited if he allowed any evidence to come in his trial that showed he was mentally ill.