U.S. Justice Department authorizes death penalty for 1st time in Biden term, for Buffalo mass shooter

U.S. federal prosecutors will seek the death penalty against a white supremacist who killed 10 Black people at a Buffalo supermarket, they said in a court filing Friday.

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 Justice Department has made federal death penalty cases a rarity since the election of President Joe Biden, a Democrat who opposes capital punishment.

Attorney General Merrick Garland had instituted a moratorium on federal executions in 2021 pending a review of procedures.

Since then jurors have considered the death penalty in two federal cases with origins that predated the Biden presidency.

An antisemitic gunman who murdered 11 people at a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018 was sentenced to death last year, while a life sentence was handed down last year for an Islamic extremist who killed eight people on a New York City bike path in 2017, when the jury could not come to a unanimous agreement on sentencing.

The Justice Department has declined to pursue the death penalty in other mass killings. It passed on seeking the execution of a gunman who killed 23 people at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, in 2019.

Mixed views from relatives of victims

After meeting with prosecutors hours before a Friday hearing in the case, one of the relatives, Mark Talley, shared his thoughts.

"I'm not necessarily disappointed in the decision. 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," said Talley, whose 63-year-old mother Geraldine Talley was killed.

"I would prefer he spend the rest of his life in prison suffering every day," he added.

Other relatives of the victims in the past have expressed mixed views on whether they thought federal prosecutors should pursue the death penalty.

WATCH l Judge rips Gendron, other hateful acts as a 'reckoning' for U.S.:

Judge decries white supremacy during sentencing of Buffalo shooter

2 years ago

Duration 1:43

Judge Susan Eagan, the Erie County court judge who sentenced Payton Gendron to life in prison for killing ten Black people in a Buffalo supermarket, said white supremacist acts like the shooting are a 'reckoning for us as a nation.'

On May 14, 2022, Gendron attacked shoppers and workers with a semi-automatic rifle at a Tops Friendly Market in Buffalo after driving more than 320 kilometres from his home in rural Conklin, N.Y. He chose the business for its location in a predominantly Black neighbourhood and livestreamed the massacre from a camera attached to his tactical helmet.

The dead, who ranged in age from 32 to 86, included eight customers, the store security guard and a church deacon who drove shoppers to and from the store with their groceries.

The rifle Gendron fired was 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.

Three people were wounded but survived.

There was a 17-year gap between executions of federal inmates, until July 2020. That was when the U.S. Justice Department under Attorney General William Barr in Donald Trump's administration carried out the first of 13 executions between that date and January 2021.