Jury selection begins Tuesday in the federal death penalty trial of Buffalo supermarket gunman Payton Gendron — a case where the state already locked him up for life, but the Biden Justice Department decided Washington needed its own crack at him, and the framework they're using to do it expands federal power over local crime.

Gendron murdered 10 Black Americans at a Tops Friendly Market in 2022 and is already serving life without parole on state murder charges. The DOJ's decision to layer federal hate crimes charges on top raises a question neither outlet covering this trial bothers to ask: who benefits from federalizing a crime the state already punished, and what does it cost?

Gendron, then 18, drove more than 200 miles from his predominantly white hometown of Conklin to a Black neighborhood in Buffalo on May 14, 2022. He fired roughly 60 shots from a semiautomatic rifle at shoppers and employees. Video showed him apologizing to a white store worker after shooting him in the leg. He surrendered to police on the way out.

Investigators found social media posts and writings in which Gendron planned an attack to frighten non-white, non-Christian people into leaving the country. Both The Guardian and WTOP characterized his promotion of "great replacement theory" — the idea that people of color will replace white people through birth rates and immigration — as "baseless." He also tearfully renounced those views at his 2023 state trial, according to WTOP.

The 10 victims, all Black and ranging from 32 to 86 years old, included retired Buffalo police officer Aaron Salter, working as a security guard, and church deacon Heyward Patterson.

Gendron's defense won't dispute guilt. Their only job is keeping him off death row. "Nothing will change the fact that Payton Gendron will die in prison," the federal public defender's office said. "At trial, we will offer mitigating evidence about Payton that the jury needs to consider in making its decision."

Victims' families are split. Wayne Jones, whose mother Celestine Chaney was killed, wants Gendron to rot. "I really think that he should just sit and have to think about it year after year after year and just be miserable," Jones told WTOP. "He's still got well another 20-30 years of appeals."

Buffalo Common Council member Zeneta Everhart, whose son Zaire survived the shooting, took a harder line: "I've never been like out here like, 'Yay! Go for the death penalty.' That's never been me," she said. "Ten people died that day in an egregious way."

The Guardian leaned into the broader narrative, citing FBI data showing Black people have been the "number one numerical target" of bias crimes annually since 1991, with over 2,800 anti-Black incidents reported in 2025. WTOP focused more on victims' families and noted the Biden DOJ's 2024 decision to pursue death was the first capital case under then-Attorney General — though the article cuts off before naming who.

What neither outlet asks: what does this federal prosecution deliver that the state sentence didn't? Gendron dies in prison either way. The hate crimes framework gives federal prosecutors jurisdiction over a local mass murder, grows the DOJ's budget and reach, and feeds a domestic extremism narrative that funds think tanks, advocacy groups, and surveillance programs. Meanwhile, the systemic failures that enabled this — a mentally disturbed teenager radicalized online, unchecked for years — go unaddressed. The families get another trial to sit through. The taxpayer gets the bill.

The question in that Buffalo courtroom isn't whether Payton Gendron deserves to die. It's whether the federal government needed to be in that room at all — and what it costs every time Washington finds a new excuse to insert itself between a state and its criminals.