The Charleston black-church mass murder suspect, Dylann Roof, is going to serve as his own lawyer. The old saw is that someone serving as their own lawyer has a fool for a client.
There are sometimes where doing without a lawyer makes sense. I was able to file for bankruptcy pro se since the forms needed were not dissimilar to a tax form and the $1000 cost was more than I had or wanted to spend. However, I had an accounting degree, a poli-sci degree, a PhD in finance and enough lay exposure to the legal system to pull it off.
This is not such a time.
It brings back memories of a 1993 case, where a black guy, Colin Ferguson, looking to kill off white folks shot up a Long Island Railroad train. He proceeded to serve as his own lawyer after clashing with a number of high-profile defense attorneys and wound up cross-examining his surviving victims face-t0-face along with looking (and failing) to get then-president Clinton as a witness.
The Charleston case is a negative of the LIRR case, where a guy with a white-supremacist streak shot up a Wednesday night service at a black church. Hopefully, Roof won't go through the rhetorical roof and ask for Obama and or Trump as witnesses.
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