Buffalo Supermarket Shooter Wants Charges Dropped, Says Jury Was Too White

Payton Gendron, the white gunman who killed 10 Black people at a Buffalo supermarket in 2022, is asking for his charges to be dismissed, arguing that the grand jury that indicted him was too white.

Attorneys for Gendron claim that Black and Hispanic people, along with men, were “systemically and significantly underrepresented” in the jury pool used to indict him on federal hate crime and weapons charges, per ABC News. The defense is asking a judge to dismiss Gendron's charges, claiming that his constitutional right to a grand jury drawn from a fair cross-section of the community was violated.

“To illustrate this point, the grand jury that indicted Payton Gendron was drawn from a pool from which approximately one-third of the Black persons expected and one-third of the Hispanic/Latino persons expected,” the defense wrote in a court filing.

Attorneys also said that the third-party vendor responsible for compiling the jury list failed to preserve the source data, which further undermined the fairness of the process.

Prosecutors with the U.S. Attorney’s Office called the defense's argument insufficient “both as a matter of law and fact.” In a written response, prosecutors said any racial disparities in the jury pool were within acceptable legal limits and not caused by the jury selection process, which uses records from voter registration, driver’s licenses, tax rolls, disability, and unemployment benefits.

“The defendant is charged with killing 10 Black people and injuring three other individuals as part of a racially motivated attack on a grocery store,” prosecutors wrote. “He now demands that the court dismiss the indictment against him because, in his view, the implementation of the Western District of New York jury plan led to the underrepresentation of certain minority groups — including Black persons.”

U.S. District Judge Lawrence Vilardo is set to hear arguments on the motion on Thursday (August 21).

Gendron is already serving life in prison without parole after pleading guilty to state murder charges. He faces the federal death penalty if convicted in the upcoming trial, which is expected to begin next year. Gendron's lawyers filed a separate motion arguing that he should not be eligible for capital punishment because he was 18 at the time of the shooting and his brain was still developing. That motion is still under review.

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