Federal prosecutors have said they will seek the death penalty for the white man who gunned down 10 Black people at a Buffalo, New York, grocery store in 2022.
Payton Gendron, 20, pleaded guilty last year in state court for the killings at a Tops supermarket in a predominantly Black neighborhood. He was sentenced to life in prison in November.
He has been charged in federal court with 27 counts of hate crimes and gun charges.
Prosecutors cited several factors — that the killings were intentional, that they required planning and premeditation, and that they were racially motivated — as justifications for the death penalty, NPR reported.
For example, prosecutors said, he chose the store for the shootings “in order to maximize the number of Black victims.”
Gendron drove his parents car 200 miles from Conklin, New York, to Buffalow, and had intended to go to another superstore and kill more people, CrimeOnline previously reported. He was an adherent of the “great replacement theory,” a white supremacist theory.
Gendron also wounded three people in the supermarket attack, two of whom were white.
The case is the first time Attorney General Merrick Garland has allowed prosecutors to seek the death penalty in a new case. He previously permitted capital prosecutions in two cases that began during the previous administration.
The first was the case against Sayfullo Saipov, who deliberately rammed his truck into a Manhattan bike path in 2017, killing eight people. The jury in that case sentenced him to life in prison when they failed to agree on the death penalty.
The second case was that of Robert D. Bowers, convicted of killing 11 people at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue in 2018. The jury recommended the death penalty in that case.
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[Featured image: Payton Gendron/Erie County District Attorney]
