The jury in the guilt phase of Dylann Roof’s trial are going to be able to view his confession video, where he laughed while admitting that he shot and killed nine people. This is one more Christmas gift for the people of South Carolina as far as I am concerned. The first was that this ignoramus confessed to Agent Michael Stansbury a mere seventeen hours after his capture when Agent Stansbury sought permission to question him prior to the flight that brought him back to face the music in Charleston. The next came when the little twerp decided to represent himself.

The white supremacist shamelessly admitted that he shot the parishioners of the Emanuel AME church in Charleston and asked Agent Stansbury if he was lying to him when the agent asked him how he felt knowing that he had shot and killed nine people. All this stellar example of a human being had to say in response was “Well, it makes me feel bad”.  In the video Stansbury asked him why he chose to shoot people who were in church and his MENSA-worthy response was that he had thought about attacking drug dealers, but was afraid that they would fight back.

Last Friday at the trial, Roof’s personal journal was read aloud in the court room. As one would expect it was chock full of insipid thoughts and comments on race such as “How could our faces, skin color and body structure be so different, but our brains exactly the same?” Stunning how one person could be so painfully ignorant. Evidently he also wrote about such enlightening (and false) topics as how black men rape white women daily.

I am sure that the response in the courtroom to that revelation was lively. This trial has been a spectacle from the start and evidently this past Wednesday his mother had a heart attack in the courtroom. I feel for her, if his claims that he did not discuss his racist beliefs with his friends or family were in fact true. Honestly if I had to realize that I had inflicted such a horrific human on this planet and heard this kind of tripe coming out of his journal in court, I might have a heart attack too. After all what mother wouldn’t want to hear her son remark when asked if he had thought about killing more black people after the church shooting, “Oh, no. I was worn out.”  (disgusting). Roof also confessed to saving one bullet for himself (natch) but decided against shooting himself when he did not immediately see police responding.

I for one am thankful that we have a legal system that will allow someone like this to self represent. After all as the Bard said so eloquently in his day “A man who is his own lawyer has a fool for a client”.  Roof has an attorney, David Bruck,  to help him in this phase of the trial and he was certainly trying to earn his fee yesterday when he asked the judge to declare a mistrial due to the emotional testimony of survivor Felicia Sanders on Wednesday.

“Sanders told jurors about the horror of seeing her son and her aunt shot to death and sheltering with her granddaughter beneath a table. At one point, she looked across the courtroom toward Roof and called him “evil, evil, evil.”

Bruck asked her on cross-examination whether she remembered Roof saying anything in the aftermath of the shootings.

“He said he was going to kill himself,” she said. “I was counting on that. There’s no place on Earth for him other than the pit of hell.”

Bruck argued that Sanders statement was inappropriate since it appeared to comment on what Roof’s sentence should be. Frankly, I think it fits perfectly.