Publication: The New York Review of Books March 9, 2017

In a first of two articles on the trial against Dylann Roof, Ball spends a lot of time explaining what really happened in the church in Charleston in that day in June 2015. But he does not talk only about the crime and the trial - we tries to bring to life all the actors - dead or alive - in an event that scared a community. The victims and the survivors, the lawyers and the judge, the prison guards and the killer himself - most of them local, most of them with their own peculiarities.

There is a common idea that most of the people that commit this kind of crimes have low IQ and never had a chance in their life. Roof seems to the opposite of that - he may be uneducated but he has a high enough IQ. An even if his family does not seem to be very supportive at that point (not surprising really), he does have a family. And seems to have used it all for everything but good. The article is written in a true crime book (shorter and more condense) and as such it pulls on every string in one's soul. The question is not if Roof did it, the only question really is if the court will sentence him to death. And Ball uses his article to sketch the story of capital punishment in the State and on the Federal level.

It finishes almost abruptly - with a mother that cannot stand it anymore. It is a well written story of a history that everyone wishes never happened.