In the USA they wanted to execute a young racist who killed 10 black people in a supermarket

The US is seeking the death penalty for the Buffalo shooter who killed 10 people at a supermarket. A man who was 19 when he carried out a racist attack on black shoppers at a Tops supermarket in 2022 has been charged with hate crimes.

Federal prosecutors will seek the death penalty for the white supremacist who killed 10 black people at a Buffalo supermarket in May 2022, The Guardian writes.

The US Justice Department has decided to seek the death penalty for 20-year-old Payton Gendron for federal hate crimes, according to a new lawsuit. He was 19 years old when he carried out a racist, murderous attack on shoppers in a predominantly black neighborhood in upstate New York.

He was originally sentenced to life in prison last February after a sentencing hearing in which he was forced to listen to relatives of his victims express their pain and rage.

Peyton Gendron’s sentencing hearing was disrupted when a man in the audience attacked him and was quickly detained.

According to The Guardian, Gendron, whose hatred was fueled by racist conspiracy theories he encountered online, pleaded guilty in November 2022 to state charges of crimes including murder and domestic hate terrorism, a charge that automatically carried life imprisonment.

New York State does not have the death penalty, but the U.S. Department of Justice has the ability to seek the death penalty in a separate federal hate crimes case. Gendron has promised to plead guilty in the case if prosecutors agree not to seek the death penalty.

In a notice announcing the decision to seek the death penalty, Trini Ross, a Western New York prosecutor, wrote that Gendron targeted the supermarket “to maximize the number of black victims.”

The notice cited a number of factors behind the decision, including the extensive planning leading up to the shooting and the decision to target at least one victim who was “particularly vulnerable due to advanced age and infirmity.”

Genron did not appear at a press conference on his case, held on Friday afternoon after receiving news of the filing, The Guardian notes.

Relatives of the victims expressed mixed opinions about whether they believe federal prosecutors should seek the death penalty. After meeting with prosecutors hours before Friday’s hearing in the case, one of the relatives, Mark Talley, shared his thoughts.

“I’m not necessarily disappointed with the decision… I would be more satisfied if I knew he would have spent the rest of his life in prison surrounded by the people he tried to kill,” said Talley, whose 63-year-old mother Geraldine Talley was killed .

The US Justice Department has made federal death penalty cases rare following the election of Joe Biden, a Democrat who opposes the death penalty.

This is the first time Merrick Garland, the US attorney general, has authorized a new use of the death penalty. Under his leadership, the Justice Department allowed two capital prosecutions to continue and stopped using the death penalty in more than two dozen cases.

Garland imposed a moratorium on federal executions in 2021 pending a review of procedures. While the moratorium does not prevent prosecutors from seeking death sentences, the Justice Department is proceeding cautiously.

At the time of the supermarket shooting, Buffalo, an old rust belt city located on Lake Erie on the US-Canadian border, was the sixth most segregated city and third poorest in the country, The Guardian writes. Blacks make up 34% of its population of 255,000. Nearly three-quarters of them live on the city’s east side, according to a 2021 report from the University at Buffalo Center for Urban Research.