CHARLESTON, S.C. — The Rev. Sharon Risher often thinks these days about what she calls her “humanness”: the passing impulse to crave the execution of the white supremacist accused of killing her mother and eight other black churchgoers last year.
“My humanness is being broken, my humanness of wanting this man to be broken beyond punishment,” Ms. Risher said. “You can’t do that if you really say that you believe in the Bible and you believe in Jesus Christ. You can’t just waver.”
But after delays, the Federal District Court here will begin on Monday the long process of individually questioning prospective jurors for the capital trial of Dylann S. Roof, who is charged with 33 federal counts, including hate crimes, in the June 17, 2015, killings at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church.
Mr. Roof, whom a judge on Friday declared competent to stand trial, has offered, in exchange for a sentence of life in prison, to plead guilty. The government has refused to make such a plea agreement.
The 17-month path to Mr. Roof’s first death penalty trial — the state of South Carolina is also seeking his execution — has been marked by public demonstrations of forgiveness and reconciliation. But the federal government’s decision to pursue Mr. Roof’s execution is widely questioned, and it is in defiance of the wishes and recommendations of survivors of the attack, many family members of the dead and some Justice Department officials. Even South Carolina’s acrimonious debate about the display of the Confederate battle flag outside the State House was less divisive in this state, polling shows.
In May, Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch announced her decision to seek the death penalty against Mr. Roof, and critics of that choice make different, if sometimes overlapping, arguments.
Some are opposed to capital punishment in every instance because they doubt its efficacy or morality. Others argue that because a death sentence for Mr. Roof would prompt years of appeals, the decision can only protract the emotional agony of a massacre that rattled the nation. And still others contend that executing a young man like Mr. Roof, who is 22, could allow him to escape decades of punishment.
“I want that guy every morning when he wakes up, and every time he has an opportunity for quiet and solitude, to think of what Tywanza said to him: ‘We mean you no harm. You don’t have to do this,’” said Andrew J. Savage III, a Charleston lawyer, referring to Tywanza Sanders, a 26-year-old man who died in the attack. Mr. Savage represents three survivors, including Mr. Sanders’s mother, and many family members of the victims who became known here as the Emanuel Nine.
But Ms. Lynch chose to seek the death penalty after a contentious review process that included South Carolina’s top federal prosecutor siding with Mr. Roof’s defense lawyers in their offer of a guilty plea in exchange for a life sentence. Ms. Lynch said that “the nature of the alleged crime and the resulting harm compelled this decision.”
In a court filing the same day the attorney general made her decision public, the Justice Department cited nine aggravating factors, including that Mr. Roof had “expressed hatred and contempt towards African-Americans, as well as other groups, and his animosity toward African-Americans played a role in the murder charges in the indictment.”
Prosecutors also said that Mr. Roof had “demonstrated a lack of remorse” and that he had caused “injury, harm and loss to the individuals that he killed as well as to the family, friends and co-workers of those individuals.”
The Justice Department declined to comment further for this article.
Although Ms. Lynch’s decision capped a process formally shrouded in secrecy, it was an unsurprising one to observers like Ms. Risher, who said she had felt as early as last December that prosecutors would seek the death penalty in one of the highest profile criminal matters before the Justice Department.
The case’s prominence influenced Ms. Lynch’s decision, according to people with knowledge of the Justice Department’s review, and some federal officials worried that forgoing the death penalty would effectively curb the government’s options in future cases with lower fatality counts and less public scrutiny. Some of the people insisted on anonymity to discuss a confidential process.
“I think what the federal government did is what the federal government thought it had to do, which was speak on behalf of the nation,” Mr. Savage said. “I was always told, ‘Well, Andy, if we don’t move for the death penalty in this case, when would we?’”
Such a strategy, he suggested, was to the detriment of the families of the victims.
“It’s bad enough to live with it in 2015, 2016 and 2017,” he said. “But don’t make them carry that legal cause on for 20 years.”
There were other arguments, too. When the Attorney General’s Review Committee on Capital Cases met in Washington to hear from a defense lawyer — David I. Bruck — and William N. Nettles, then the United States attorney for South Carolina, they were told that a federal death penalty trial would be duplicative of local efforts and turn greater public attention to Mr. Roof.
“I felt when I was the United States attorney that the job — and I used to preach this over and over again — was to step in when the state was either unwilling or unable,” said Mr. Nettles, who left the Justice Department in June. “The state was both willing and able to address this issue.”
Mr. Nettles otherwise declined to discuss the case. Mr. Bruck declined to comment. Members of Mr. Roof’s family have refused to discuss the case, but they said in a statement this month that they were “still struggling to understand why Dylann caused so much grief and pain to so many good people.”
The question of whether Mr. Roof should face execution surfaced soon after the killings, which happened during a Wednesday night Bible study at the whitewashed, historic church on Calhoun Street. Within 48 hours of the shootings, and less than a day after Mr. Roof was arrested, Gov. Nikki R. Haley of South Carolina said on television that she “absolutely will want him to have the death penalty.”
A University of South Carolina survey, conducted last spring, found that 55 percent of South Carolina residents supported a death sentence for Mr. Roof. But divisions among black and white residents were stark: The poll showed that only 31 percent of black residents wanted Mr. Roof to face execution, while some 64 percent of whites backed the use of capital punishment in the case.
Ms. Risher knows about the divides. And as she anxiously waited for Mr. Roof’s trial to begin, she kept returning to the many flashes of doubt she has endured about her own beliefs about Mr. Roof’s fate.
“I just start talking to God,” she said. “Hell, I might start screaming at God. I just go there because I know I have to go there because I can’t hold onto that.”
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