Payton Gendron’s public defense lawyers will present mitigating evidence to the U.S. Attorney General’s Office on Sept. 18 to try to persuade the office not to seek the death penalty against the Buffalo mass shooter.
The death penalty decision could come shortly thereafter, they said at a federal court hearing Wednesday.
Lawyers for Buffalo mass shooter Payton Gendron want a magistrate judge replaced in his federal case, saying they want their motions, if any, to wait until U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland decides whether to pursue the death penalty.
The defense lawyers revealed the upcoming meeting on the day a federal jury in Pittsburgh unanimously voted to sentence to death a gunman who killed 11 people at the Tree of Life synagogue in 2018 in that city. It was the highest-casualty antisemitic attack in the nation’s history.
Gendron, a self-described white supremacist, admitted in his writings before the attack that he picked the Tops Markets grocery store on Jefferson Avenue for his attack because it was located in a neighborhood with a high percentage of Black residents, and he wanted to kill as many Black people as he could.
At Wednesday’s hearing, U.S. District Judge Lawrence Vilardo said he will begin handling pretrial motions in the…
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