COLUMBIA, S.C. — Legendary death penalty lawyer David Bruck has acknowledged he made numerous mistakes while leading the defense team during Dylann Roof’s 2016-17 death penalty trial, errors that may have caused the jury to give Roof the death penalty.

Bruck’s admissions of missteps and misjudgments in the Charleston church killer case are contained in a 13-page public filing in U.S. District Court in Charleston. The filing is one of the key parts of a bid by Roof’s new defense team to set aside his conviction and death sentence and win a new trial by alleging his trial lawyers, including Bruck, were ineffective.

Roof, of Columbia, then a 21-year-old marijuana-smoking ninth-grade dropout who had been radicalized by white supremacist writings on the Internet, shot and killed execution-style nine African Americans at a Bible study prayer meeting on June 15, 2015, at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston. Three others survived.

He was given the death penalty in January 2017 after a trial in Charleston federal court. It was one of the highest profile criminal trials in modern South Carolina and U.S. history. There was no doubt of Roof’s guilt. Not only were there surveillance tapes of him leaving the church after the killings; he confessed on videotape the next day to two FBI agents. The only question at his trial was: Would the jury recommend death?

As the 10th anniversary of the Charleston church massacre approaches in June, Roof’s latest attempt to escape the death penalty is sure to attract renewed attention.

Some themes in Bruck’s declaration — such as the mentally impaired Roof’s controversial decision to represent himself in the trial’s death penalty phase over defense team objections — were already publicly known.

But Bruck’s declaration is the first extensive insider look at the travails of Roof’s attorneys in that historic trial.

One of his biggest errors, Bruck wrote, was eliciting damaging information on cross examination about Roof with the first prosecution witness in the guilt phase of the trial.

Bruck triggers a “disaster”

“It was awful,” wrote Bruck, who was trying to get Felicia Sanders, a survivor of Roof’s massacre, to tell the jury she heard Roof say he was going to commit suicide.

“Instead, I elicited inflammatory and damaging testimony about my client being ‘evil’ and belonging in ‘the pit of hell.’ I initially didn’t hear what Ms. Sanders said, so I asked my question again. She repeated the harmful statements,” Bruck wrote.

“It was an incredibly poor choice of me to ask Ms. Sanders any questions. I regret my decision deeply and I think it did have an impact on the rest of the trial, making the death sentence for Dylann significantly more likely,” Bruck wrote.

Making matters worse, wrote Bruck, was the reason he asked the same question twice — getting damaging information before the jury twice — was that his hearing was bad and he needed hearing aids.

“I now wear hearing aids. I can see that I needed them at the time of Dylann’s trial. My impaired hearing is probably why I didn’t hear Ms. Sanders the first time she said her damaging statements about Dylann.”

The filing by Bruck, who rarely comments publicly on details of his numerous high-profile death penalty cases, is being used by Roof’s new legal team in a new effort to overturn his conviction and death sentence.

The new legal team’s criticism of Bruck in its appeal, and Bruck’s detailed filing admitting his errors, is also unusual in this respect: Bruck is generally regarded as a master death penalty strategist, someone who doesn’t make mistakes, or many mistakes, such as the ones he is admitting in his declaration.

A legal legend

A native of Canada who graduated from Harvard in 1971 and the University of South Carolina School of Law in 1975, Bruck spent more than 25 years in South Carolina, gaining a national reputation for overturning numerous convictions and death sentences in the S.C. Supreme Court. In 1995, he and colleague Judy Clarke got a Union County jury to give Susan Smith, who had drowned her two children, a life sentence instead of the death penalty.

Bruck, now 75, also has argued seven death penalty cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, winning six and setting precedents that freed condemned men from death row.

He is regarded as not only an exceptional trial lawyer who can grill witnesses and make jury arguments, but also as one who knows how to frame lost cases and win them on appeal. In 2004, he joined the faculty of Washington and Lee Law School in Virginia and directed a legal clinic training young lawyers how to fight against the death penalty. His work is credited with helping Virginia in 2021 become the first Southern state to abolish the death penalty.

Bruck is such an accomplished and fervent opponent of the death penalty that U.S. District Judge Richard Gergel, who presided at Roof’s trial and who is overseeing Roof’s latest bid for a new trial, may view the confession by such a legal pro as, at least in part and although true, yet another wily stratagem to overturn Roof’s death sentence.

Other missteps Bruck acknowledged in his declaration:

—“I was committed to the notion of going to trial in the federal case first. The result was that we went to trial before we were ready.” Bruck said he chose a speedy trial so as to try his case in federal court before state prosecutors, led by 9th Judicial Circuit Solicitor Scarlett Wilson, had their own death penalty trial.

—Several months before the trial began, after a key member of the defense team left, Bruck began to realize he didn’t have enough time. “At that time, I did not anticipate the disaster that was coming,” Bruck wrote. He began calling their effort “Mission Impossible.” He also wrote, “The decision to go to trial in November 2016 was made based on incomplete information and prior to having secured the assistance of critical experts and key members of the defense team.”

—By the summer of 2016, Bruck and his team believed Roof had autism. Roof — who emphatically denied he had autism and distrusted psychiatric diagnoses — learned about the team’s plans to introduce mental health issues into the death penalty phase of the trial. He became very angry and “very upset.” Bruck wrote it was a mistake that the defense team, knowing how sensitive Roof was to being labeled as someone with mental issues, did not better prepare Roof for autism being part of the defense strategy. “We had a plan to reveal our diagnoses to Dylann, but we should have done it much earlier,” Bruck wrote.

—Bruck says he should have followed a jury consultant’s recommendation to explore requesting a change of venue.

—When Roof heard from a government doctor that the defense team intended to tell the jury he suffered from autism, “This infuriated an already suspicious client, and he sent a letter to the prosecution, which was forwarded to the Court, on Nov. 3, 2016. He expressed distrust of our team and wanted to represent himself.” The disclosure to Roof about the autism defense “irreparably damaged” Roof’s relations with his team. “Dylann became convinced that we were liars who had been tricking him all along. We did not have time to work with him to repair the damage to our relationship.”

—Judge Gergel held a pretrial mental competency hearing for Roof in the weeks before trial. “While our team was made up of seasoned capital litigators, none of us had ever worked on a competency proceeding in a federal capital case. This led to errors and the failure to anticipate numerous problems in our chosen strategy.”

—After Gergel found Roof competent to stand trial and to represent himself, Bruck “did not object to that, which was a mistake.”

—The defense team failed to consult with the experts who would have explained Roof’s incapacity to relate normally to events around him. “We were so focused on what we saw as Dylann’s delusions and psychosis that we failed to think about the ways his brain was impaired, or ways his cognition was affected. We knew he had a high IQ, and this blinded me to the ways he was still impaired.... our failure to follow the experts’ recommendations kept us from discovering these impairments.”

—A key defense expert, Dr. Amy Fritz, a speech language pathologist, found that Roof had a large vocabulary and could form complex sentences, but has “communication and processing impairments. I attributed these to the diagnosis of autism, but failed to explain these limitations to the Court... I failed to understand that his processing ability and auditory processing were preventing him from participating in the courtroom proceedings.”

—After Roof was found competent to stand trial, the relationship between him and the defense team became “so fractured he could no longer trust us. He clearly did not want to represent himself, but he did not trust us. ... I felt that Dylann was incompetent and therefore I felt that I could not let him control the presentation of evidence. It was proposed in a team discussion that we negotiate with Dylann. I would not hear of it.”

—After the death penalty was announced, Roof was shocked. He said, “I’m just a kid. I thought they liked me” (referring to the jury). “Representing Dylann felt like representing an eight-year-old child,” Bruck wrote. “He was the only person in the courtroom who was shocked by the jury’s death verdict, though of course our team was devastated.”

Roof’s second appeal

Roof has already appealed his conviction and sentence up the legal chain up to the U.S. Supreme Court, which rejected his appeal. The new appeal focuses on matters that weren’t addressed in his first appeal.

Among other charges, Roof was convicted on nine counts of hate crimes resulting in death, three counts of hate crimes involving an attempt to kill and nine counts of obstruction of exercise of religion resulting in death.

Another member of Roof’s defense team, Emily Paavola, wrote in a statement that Roof’s decision not to put up witnesses during the death penalty phase of the trial hurt Roof.

“Joe Roof (Dylann’s grandfather, a well-liked and respected Columbia attorney) would have been a strong witness. He truly loved Dylann, was thoughtful, and was easy to empathize with, ” Paavola wrote. “I really hoped Grandpa Joe would have convinced the jury to spare Dylann’s life.”

Paavola also wrote that the high emotions the prosecution’s case elicited — most of the courtroom “were in tears” — were unfair to Roof in the penalty phase of the trial when he was representing himself. “A lot was happening in the courtroom that should have been curtailed. Dylann didn’t object to any of it, and we could not. It was a farce.”

Paavola also wrote, “Naturally, given his experience and reputation, David Bruck became the unofficial leader of the entire group. That David was the leader was understood by everyone on the team.”

Boyd Young, veteran South Carolina death penalty defense attorney, said in an interview that a long declaration such as the one Bruck made in the Roof appeal is not a normal filing by a trial attorney who loses a death penalty case at trial.

But then again, the Roof trial with its rushed timetable, high emotion, mental health and racial issues, was not a normal trial, Young said. “I don’t think there is another trial like the Roof trial. I’ve never seen another case like it,” said Young, chief attorney for the death penalty division of the S.C. Commission on Indigent Defense.

Bruck’s declaration is one of 171 exhibits attached to a 379-page motion to vacate or set aside Roof’s conviction and death sentence. The motion was filed last week in U.S. District Court in Charleston. Some of the exhibits and parts of motion are sealed from public view.

A major claim in the lengthy motion is that “a total breakdown” in communication between the defense lawyers and Roof resulted in no mitigating evidence being place before the jury in the death penalty phase of the trial.

Defense lawyers “deceived” Roof by withholding crucial elements of their strategy from him, the motion asserts, and when Roof found out, he didn’t trust them again, hurting the case. Other claims allege that defense attorneys’ missteps resulted in Gergel’s failure to properly assess Roof’s ability to represent himself and that three pro-death penalty jurors should have been stricken by the judge.

Roof, 31, is one of three condemned men on federal death row in Terre Haute, Indiana, along with 2013 Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and Robert Bowers, who shot and killed 11 congregants in 2018 at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue, the deadliest antisemitic attack in U.S history.

Before leaving office, former President Joe Biden pardoned 37 other men awaiting execution on federal death row, but let stand the convictions of Roof, Tsarnaev and Bowers.

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