Vanita Gupta and Dylann Roof

Dylann Roof is the white supremacist who killed nine African-Americans while they were studying the Bible at a church in Charleston, South Carolina. The Obama Justice Department prosecuted Roof. In doing so, it had to decide whether to seek the death penalty.

Vanita Gupta, then the acting assistant attorney general, recommended against seeking the death penalty. However, the attorney general, Loretta Lynch, overruled Gupta.

The legal issue was whether, in Roof’s case, extenuating factors outweighed aggravating ones. In making her recommendation, Gupta argued that, somehow, they did.

The argument was preposterous. This is clear from the statement Loretta Lynch issued after Roof’s conviction. She accurately described the facts as follows:

Roof conceived of his goal of increasing racial tensions throughout the nation and seeking retribution for perceived wrongs he believed African Americans had committed against white people.

To carry out these twin goals of fanning racial flames and exacting revenge, Roof further decided to seek out and murder African Americans because of their race. An essential element of his plan, however, was to find his victims inside of a church, specifically an African-American church, to ensure the greatest notoriety and attention to his actions.

As alleged, Roof set forth the evening of June 17, 2015 to carry out this plan and drove to the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, known as “Mother Emanuel.” Mother Emanuel was his destination specifically because it was a historically African-American church of significance to the people of Charleston, of South Carolina and the nation.

On that summer evening, Dylann Roof found his targets, African Americans engaged in worship. Met with welcome by the ministers of the church and its parishioners, he joined them in their bible study group. The parishioners had bibles. Dylann Roof had his 45 caliber glock pistol and eight magazines loaded with hollow point bullets. And as set forth in the indictment, while the parishioners of Mother Emanuel were engaged in religious worship and bible study, Dylann Roof drew his pistol and opened fire on them, ultimately killing nine church members.

(Emphasis added)

Roof’s mass murder spree wasn’t just premeditated. Apparently, it was re-meditated. Roof said that the Blacks at the church were so welcoming to him that he reevaluated whether to kill them. He decided, again, to do so.

There is no plausible argument that extenuating factors outweigh aggravating ones in Roof’s case. To conclude that they do would plainly contradict the view that Black lives matter.

I’m not saying that Gupta believes that Black lives don’t matter. Her leniency recommendation wasn’t animated by insufficient regard for Black lives. Rather, it was the product of her opposition to the death penalty.

But this opposition does not excuse the recommendation. Gupta had options other than making ridiculous legal arguments against seeking the death penalty for Roof.

She could have recused herself from the matter, on the grounds that her ideological opposition (or religious opposition, if that was the case) precluded her from recommending the death penalty even if the applicable law called for its imposition. That would probably have been the most honorable thing to do.

I imagine, though, that Gupta felt she couldn’t disengage from such a high profile case. Indeed, at her Senate confirmation hearing this week, she claimed credit for Roof’s conviction and death penalty sentence occurring “on her watch.”

Alternatively, Gupta could have recommended against the death penalty on policy grounds. The recommendation would have fallen on deaf ears because the law, not Gupta’s policy preferences, govern the matter. But at least the reasoning would have been intellectually honest.

Finally, Gupta could have argued faithfully to the law. In that case, she would have reached the only plausible conclusion — that the DOJ should seek the death penalty for Roof.

Gupta rejected all of these options. She chose instead to stand on an embarrassing memo recommending against the death penalty for a white supremacist who wanted to trigger a race war by mass murdering Blacks at a church.

And now, Gupta claims credit for the mass murderer getting the death sentence.

The Senate should reject Gupta’s nomination to be associate attorney general, the number three job at the DOJ, because (1) she recommended leniency for Dylann Roof based on the view that extenuating factors outweighed aggravating ones in the premeditated massacre of Blacks at a church and (2) she tried to mislead the Senate about the matter.