Man who killed 10 in Buffalo mass shooting wants death penalty trial relocated to NYC
Man who killed 10 in Buffalo mass shooting wants death penalty trial relocated to NYC
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Mass shootings: How to talk to your kids about acts of violence
Talking about acts of violence like mass shootings with your children is not easy. If you have to have that difficult talk, remember the four S's.
USA TODAY
A white gunman who killed 10 Black people in a Buffalo supermarket is requesting to move his death penalty trial to New York City in order to be judged by a racially diverse jury, according to his attorney's court filing.
Payton Gendron's attorneys filed the request Monday in U.S. District Court for the Western District of New York, arguing that assembling an impartial jury would be impossible in the area affected by the shooting. Gendron pleaded guilty to 15 state charges in 2022 for the massacre at the Tops Friendly Market in East Buffalo and now faces a separate jury to decide whether he will be put to death.
"Due to the overwhelming amount of pretrial publicity, combined with the impact of this case on Buffalo's segregated communities of color, it is impossible for Payton Gendron to select a fair and impartial jury in the Western District of New York," Gendron's lawyers wrote.
Gendron's lawyers say the majority of Black Buffalo residents live in East Buffalo. Gendron targeted the Tops Friendly Market to maximize the number of Black victims, according to his lawyers.
"If the verdict in this case is to carry any moral authority, it should be delivered by a diverse group of citizens," Gendron's attorneys Sonya Zoghlin, Monica Foster, Marybeth Covert and Julie Brain wrote in court documents. Zoghlin, Foster and Covert are federal public defenders. Brain is a Philadelphia-based lawyer who primarily represents people facing the death penalty.
New York state, where Gendron pleaded guilty to the state charges, does not have the death penalty. But federal authorities independently opted to pursue hate crime charges against Gendron that carry a death sentence.
The attorneys proposed moving the case to a federal court in New York City, where there are a sufficient number of minorities who weren't directly impacted by the shooting that could potentially serve on the jury.
Gendron's lawyers didn't immediately respond to USA TODAY's request for comment.
In May 2022, Gendron shot 13 people with a semiautomatic rifle at the upstate New York supermarket. Three people survived the attack, which he livestreamed. According to documents posted online, Gendron hoped the shooting would help preserve white power in the U.S.
A N.Y. judge handed Gendron a lengthy prison sentence in 2023 after Gendron pleaded guilty to 10 counts of first-degree murder, one count of domestic terrorism motivated by hate, three counts of attempted murder as a hate crime and one count of criminal possession of a weapon. He is serving 11 life sentences, which are running concurrently, 25 years for each attempted murder charge and 15 years for the weapons charge.
The U.S. Attorney's Office in Buffalo declined to comment on the filing. Federal prosecutors have not filed a response to the motion.
Lawyers: Media coverage, survivors complicate jury trial in Buffalo
According to the filing, the attorneys estimated that more than 800 articles have been published by Buffalo media outlets since May 2022 about the shooting, Gendron, victims and sentencing in state court. They noted the estimate was conservative as they relied on keyword searches that didn't capture all possible terms.
They said that remarks from former President Joe Biden calling Gendron "a hate-filled soul" in the Associated Press, New York Governor Kathy Hochul calling the shooting an act of terrorism in the Buffalo News and statements from other politicians created adverse media coverage.
"The media frenzy in the days and weeks following the shooting was extraordinary though perhaps not entirely unexpected," the attorneys wrote. "The defense tracked 130 local news articles in the fourteen days following the shooting."
They added that the Supreme Court of the U.S. upheld the belief that when a community selects jurors from an area affected by negative media coverage, "there arises a presumption of prejudice."
"The impact of the shooting on East Buffalo was felt far beyond those who were killed, injured, or in the vicinity when the shooting occurred," attorneys wrote. "The entire neighborhood was impacted dramatically."
More than 75 volunteer or community organizations helped survivors and the neighborhood recover from the shooting, the court filing said. Gendron's lawyers said Buffalo's motto of being a "city of good neighbors" meant many people who assisted those organizations would be unfit to serve on a jury because of their emotional ties to the case.
Gendron's attorneys are seeking a racially diverse pool that would effectively "express the conscience of the community" in a case that has centered around hate-motivated murder. They argued that Gendron's death penalty verdict "must not be returned by a racially monolithic body. Federal juries are frequently criticized for their whiteness and for their lack of diversity."
That happened in the 2012 trial of George Zimmerman, who prosecutors said shot and killed Trayvon Martin, a Black child. In the trial, he was acquitted of second-degree murder and manslaughter charges by an all-women jury that had only one nonwhite juror. Gendron's attorney said a New York City jury and courtroom would be a better fit for the death penalty trial to deliver a fair verdict and handle what they expect to be an overwhelming number of spectators and media.
U.S. District Court Judge Lawrence J. Vilardo hasn't yet issued a hearing for Gendron's request.
Feds pursuing the death penalty against Luigi Mangione, others
Gendron is one of several people for whom federal prosecutors are seeking the death penalty in 2025.
Attorney General Pam Bondi said Tuesday she directed the Justice Department to pursue the death penalty against Luigi Mangione, who is accused of killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in New York City. Mangione faces federal and state criminal charges in Thompson's Dec. 4 death outside of a hotel. His lawyer Karen Friedman Agnifilo called the DOJ's move "political."
Only three people are on death row in the federal system - Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, Robert Bowers and Dylann Roof. Biden declined to commute their sentences because they were convicted of terrorism and hate-motivated mass murder. He commuted the sentences of 37 people to prevent the Trump administration from resuming executions he stopped.
Tsarnaev was convicted of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing that killed three people and injured more than 260. Bowers was convicted of the 2018 mass shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh that killed 11 people. Roof was convicted in the 2015 Charleston, South Carolina, mass shooting where he killed nine people at Mother Emanuel, a historically Black church.
Contact reporter Krystal Nurse at knurse@USATODAY.com. Follow her on X @KrystalRNurse, and on BlueSky @krystalrnuse.bsky.social.
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