10 killed in Buffalo in act of white supremacist terrorism

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The Gazpacho Police need to lock them up.
https://www.mediaite.com/tv/marjorie-ta ... -congress/

There really are just a few brain cells rattling around in that wasteland between her ears, aren't there?

Yet another female GOP politicians with outlandish conspiracy theories blaming leftists for setting up the mass shooting
https://www.reddit.com/r/VoteDEM/commen ... a_federal/

How on earth can anyone vote for this idiot?

The 19-year-old white gunman accused of targeting and killing 10 Black people and injuring three others at a Buffalo, N.Y. grocery store last May pleaded guilty Monday to state charges against him.

Payton Gendron was charged on the state level with one count of domestic terrorism in the first degree, 10 counts of first-degree murder, 10 counts of second-degree murder as a hate crime, three counts of attempted second-degree murder as a hate crime and one count of second-degree criminal possession of a weapon.

He pleaded guilty to 15 counts, including the 10 counts of first-degree murder, which automatically dismissed the remaining 10 second-degree charges.

"The evidence of the defendant's guilt is overwhelming ... This case is a poster child for swift justice," said Erie County District Attorney John Flynn in a press conference following the hearing.

"This racist murderer did not accomplish what he set out to do. Because today, this community is stronger and cause today, this community is stronger and better than it ever was. ... Love always conquers hate."

Sentencing has been scheduled for Feb 15, but Flynn said Erie County Judge Susan Egan will be required to sentence Gendron to life without parole, New York's highest sentence, for pleading guilty to the first-degree domestic terrorism charge.

Flynn also said that Gendron was the first person in the history of New York state to be found guilty of that charge.

At the federal level, Gendron is facing additional charges, including 10 counts of hate crimes resulting in death and three counts of hate crimes involving an attempt to kill, along with 13 counts of using, carrying or discharging a firearm.

If convicted on all 27 federal charges, Gendron could face either the death penalty or a second sentence of life in prison without parole. The attorney general will decide at a later date on whether to seek the death penalty, according to the Justice Department.

The gunman who killed 10 people and injured three more in a racist mass shooting at a Buffalo, New York, supermarket last year was sentenced on Wednesday to life in prison without parole. The sentencing came during a tense hearing in which someone in the audience rushed at the gunman and was restrained by a court officer.

"There can be no mercy for you, no understanding, no second chances," said Judge Susan Eagan while delivering the sentence in court. "The damage you have caused is too great and the people you have hurt are too valuable to this community. You will never see the light of day as a free man ever again."

Payton Gendron, a white supremacist from Conklin, New York, who was 18 years old at the time of the massacre, appeared in Erie County Court to receive the expected sentence after pleading guilty in November to all state charges brought against him, which included multiple counts of murder in the first degree and an additional count of domestic terrorism motivated by hate. The terrorism charge carries an automatic life sentence without the possibility of parole.

The gunman, now 19, had initially pleaded not guilty to the state charges as well as federal charges announced several months after the shooting. The federal charges — 14 counts for hate crimes either resulting in death or involving an attempt to kill, and another 13 for using a firearm while carrying out a hate crime — carry a maximum sentence of life imprisonment or the death penalty, should the U.S. Department of Justice decide to seek it. A 27-count indictment brought a federal grand jury also included special findings alleging that the gunman "committed the offense after substantial planning and premeditation to commit an act of terrorism," according to the Justice Department.

The shooter's guilty plea on state charges may reduce the likelihood of capital punishment. After the plea was entered during a hearing last fall, Gendron's defense attorney, Brian Parker, said the outcome "represents a condemnation" of the racist and white supremacist ideologies that motivated his attack in the spring.

The attorneys and families of the Buffalo Tops supermarket shooting victims filed a new civil lawsuit Wednesday against several social media platforms, gun retailers, and the shooter's parents for their roles in the shooting.

The 176-page lawsuit filed in the New York Supreme Court argues that several corporations in addition to the shooter's parents played a role in May 2022 deadly mass shooting that killed 10 Black people and injured three others.

Nearly a dozen companies were mentioned in the lawsuit, including Meta (which owns both Facebook and Instagram), Reddit, Amazon (which owns Twitch), Google, YouTube, Discord and 4Chan. Other companies named in the lawsuit as defendants include RMA Armament — a body-armor manufacturer — and Vintage Firearms, LLC, a gun retailer.

The lawsuit also argues that the gunman, now 20-year-old Payton Gendron was radicalized by these social media platforms, which directly lead to him carrying out the deadly shooting.

"By his own admission, Gendron, a vulnerable teenager, was not racist until he became addicted to social media apps and was lured, unsuspectingly, into a psychological vortex by defective social media applications designed, marketed, and pushed out by social media defendants, and fed a steady stream of racist and white supremacist propaganda and falsehoods by some of those same defendants' products," the lawsuit states.

"Addiction to these defective social media products leads users like Gendron into social isolation. Once isolated, Gendron became radicalized by overexposure to fringe, racist ideologies and was primed for the reckless and wanton conduct of the weapons and body armor defendants."

Prominent civil rights attorney Ben Crump, along with attorneys Diandra Zimmerman and Terry Connors, announced the lawsuit during a news conference Wednesday, saying that these companies will be held acc

The Justice Department said Friday in a court filing it will seek the death penalty for Payton Gendron, the then-19-year-old who killed 10 people in a racially motivated shooting at a Tops Supermarket in Buffalo, New York, in May 2022.

"United States believes the circumstances in Counts 11-20 of the Indictment are such that, in the event of a conviction, a sentence of death is justified," the filing said.

Lawyers for Gendron previously said he would consider pleading guilty to the federal charges if the death penalty was taken off the table.

Grendron was not in court on Friday when prosecutor Joe Tripi formally notified the judge of the government's intent to seek the death penalty.

The defense waived Gendron's appearance, but Judge Lawrence Vilardo said he would have to show up in court soon.

"There's going to come a point in the relatively near future when he's going to need to be here," Vilardo said.

Assistant federal defender Sonya Zoghlin responded, "I'm sure the court is completely confident we are communicating with him appropriately."

The next court date is Feb. 2.

Federal prosecutors outlined the reasons why they believe a death sentence is warranted in their filing, saying, "Gendron intentionally killed Roberta Drury, Pearl Young, Hayward Patterson, Ruth Whitfield, Celestine Chaney, Aaron W Salter Jr., Andre Mackniel, Marcus Morrison, Katherine Massey and Geraldine Talley."

The Justice Department also cited Gendron's intentional infliction of bodily injury, intentional participation in an act resulting in death and the blatant racism associated with the shooting.

"Payton Gendron expressed bias, hatred, and contempt toward Black persons and his animus toward Black persons played a role," the filing said.

The defense said they were "deeply disappointed" in the DOJ's decision to pursue the death penalty.

"Rather than a prolonged and traumatic capital prosecution, the efforts of the federal government would be better spent on combatting the forces that facilitated this terrible crime, including easy access to deadly weapons and the failure of social media companies to moderate the hateful rhetoric and images that circulate online," Zoghlin said in a statement.

The decision to seek the death penalty follows more than a year of deliberations inside the Justice Department. Garland has been open in previous public appearances about his concerns regarding the death penalty, and President Joe Biden campaigned on formally abolishing it at the federal level. But in the absence of a formal policy instituted by the Biden administration, DOJ officials have debated over a so-called "worst-of-the-worst" threshold for when recommending a death sentence is appropriate in some of the most egregious cases of hate-fueled mass acts of terror.

The family members of victims said they met with prosecutors earlier Friday, where they learned the DOJ was seeking the death penalty.

Mark Talley, the son of shooting victim Geraldine Talley, told reporters the decision made some happy, though he felt Gendron is "getting off the hook" if sentenced to death.

"For me, I want something worse than that," Mark Talley said outside the federal courthouse in Buffalo. "I want him to torture, I want him to suffer, I want everything he ever loved to suffer. I want friends and family that he loved to suffer. I want possibly the worst thing that I can ever imagine to possibly happen to him."

"As far as I'm concerned, I think he's getting off the hook getting the death penalty because he won't get that suffering that I want," he continued. "As long as I'm alive, whether God gives me 20, 30 or 60 years, I wanna be able to see him to suffer."

Wayne Jones, whose mother, Celestine Chaney, was killed in the attack, also said he was not in favor of seeking the death penalty.

"I just wanted him to suffer as much as we've had to suffer," Jones told ABC News. "But I know in our group, there were people who didn't want anything else but death."

Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown said he supported the DOJ's decision to pursue the death penalty, saying it should act as a "deterrent for this type of terrible crime."

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul also said she supported the DOJ's decision.

"This complies with the DOJ requirements for what constitutes a death penalty offense," she said during an unrelated press briefing on Friday. "This community is still reeling from the atrocity of 10 innocent people on May 14 in 2022, simply going about shopping and were targeted -- targeted because of the color of their skin by a white supremacist who was radicalized online."