Lawyers seeking dismissal of federal case against Tops shooter

BUFFALO, N.Y. (WIVB) — Lawyers representing Tops supermarket mass shooter Payton Gendron have filed motions for a federal judge to dismiss the federal case against him.

In documents filed on Monday, lawyers argued that a federal case against him is not necessary to secure justice against him. Gendron has already been sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole, plus an additional 90 years for shooting and killing 10 Black people and injuring three more at the Tops supermarket on Jefferson Avenue on May 14, 2022.

Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty against Gendron, but prosecutors argue that his age at the time of the shooting, 18, should be "categorically exempting him from the death penalty."

The motion cites a May 2017 study from the United States Sentencing Commission where the commission defined a youthful offender as anyone under the age of 25 at the time of sentencing.

"The inclusion of young adults in the definition of youthful offenders is informed by recent case law and neuroscience research in which there is a growing recognition that people may not gain full reasoning skills and abilities until they reach 25 on average," the report, cited within the documents, states.

Gendron drove over three hours from Conklin, N.Y. to Buffalo to commit the crime. He had planned out his actions before the shooting and sought out a neighborhood with a high Black population. He pleaded guilty to state charges in November 2022 and was sentenced in February 2023. His federal trial is tentatively scheduled to begin on Sept. 8, 2025.

Currently, at age 20, he is at Livingston County Jail in Geneseo.

Lawyers cited delays as to why a federal case against Gendron is not in the public's best interest.

It says that the state "guaranteed that he will spend the rest of his life shut away in one of its prisons and will die there. Not only has it been established that the state is willing and able to prosecute Payton Gendron to the fullest, to condemn the acts of racial violence in the strongest possible terms and to ensure that justice is served - it has done so. Still, the federal government has offered no explanation for why it continues to press forward with a prosecution that will serve only to delay judicial resolution of the matter for years if not decades."

The documents provide a list of over 500 people who have been authorized capital defendants since the late 1980s. Just over 250 of them were aged 25 or younger at the time of the offense, and other than Gendron, the most recent crime committed by a person 25 years or younger that resulted in an authorized capital defendant took place in February 2017.

The last authorized capital defendant under age 21 at the time of their crime was Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who was 19 at the time of the April 15, 2013 bombings. He was sentenced to death in 2015, but has not yet been executed.

"The new current scientific consensus and the evolving standards of the community point in the same direction: persons in the developmental period into their early 20s - but at the very least persons like Payton Gendron who were still 18 years old at the time of their charged capital offenses - thus, should be treated differently than fully developed adults under the Supreme Court's Eighth Amendment death-penalty jurisprudence," the motion states. "The science is clear and uniform: People under 21 are not yet adults and should not be punished as such."

Watch Erie County District Attorney John Flynn speak on the motions in the video player below.