Dylann Roof offered no apology for the June 2015 murders of nine black people at a historically black South Carolina church in a jailhouse manifesto read during his sentencing trial on Wednesday.
"I would like to make it crystal clear I do not regret what I did," Roof wrote in the jailhouse journal seized by authorities in 2015, according to the New York Times. "I am not sorry. I have not shed a tear for the innocent people I killed."
In December, a jury of three black people and nine white people found Roof guilty of hate crimes, religious obstruction and firearms violations in the June 2015 attack. Roof had pleaded not guilty.
Roof sat alongside his victims for about an hour inside the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston before opening fire.
"In that moment, a man of immense hatred walked that room shooting person after person after person, stopping only so he could reload more magazines and kill more people," assistant U.S. Attorney Nathan Williams told the jury in December, according to the Post and Courier.
"It was an act of tremendous cowardice, shooting people as they have their eyes closed in prayer, shooting them on the ground."
The victims were: Tywanza Sanders, 26; Rev. Clementa Pinckney, 41; Cynthia Hurd, 54; Rev. DePayne Middleton-Doctor, 49; Ethel Lance, 70; Myra Thompson, 59 and Rev. Daniel Simmons Sr., 74.
Prosecutors said Roof planned the massacre carefully, scouting the church nearly two years before the attack and even traveling six times from his home 90 minutes away in Eastover.
He has admitted that hoped to start a race war, according to the New York Times.
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