Feds seek death for Buffalo gunman
Man, 20, killed 10 Black people in racist massacre at supermarket in 2022
The Justice Department on Friday said in court papers that it would seek to execute the gunman who killed 10 Black people in a racist massacre at a Buffalo supermarket in May 2022. It is the first time that President Joe Biden’s administration has sought the death penalty in a new case.
Payton Gendron, the 20-yearold who committed the attack after posting a hate-filled white supremacist manifesto online, had already been sentenced to life in prison without the chance of parole on state charges last year. He had pleaded guilty to 10 counts of first-degree murder and a single count of domestic terrorism motivated by hate.
The federal government has charged Gendron with hate crimes and gun charges that could bring the death penalty.
Prosecutors said in the Friday filing that the circumstances of the charges were “such that, in the event of a conviction, a sentence of death is justified.”
The decision marks the first time that Attorney General Merrick Garland has personally authorized capital punishment in a new case since he assumed office in March 2021.
Austin Sarat, a professor of law and political science at Amherst College who has long written critically about capital punishment, said Biden’s administration has shown “consistent inconsistency” in its actions regarding federal death penalty cases.
Biden is the first president to openly oppose the death penalty, Sarat said. But Garland has the final say on whether to seek capital punishment in federal prosecutions. And the Justice Department’s decisions under Garland have been “really hard to follow,” Sarat said.
President Donald Trump resumed carrying out the federal death penalty after a nearly twodecade hiatus, even as the overall number of executions in the United States fell. The federal government executed 13 people in Trump’s last year in office, including three in the final days of his presidency.
Biden campaigned on ending the federal death penalty, promising to pause federal executions and urging states to follow suit when he took office in 2021. That year, the Justice Department, under Garland, imposed a moratorium on federal executions.