Mother Emanuel's first article ends with the shooting itself and the removal of South Carolina's Confederate flag; what followed in the courts and on the church grounds has unfolded over the decade since. Dylann Roof was tried in federal court in 2016 and 2017 on hate crime and civil rights charges, representing himself during jury selection and sentencing to keep evidence of his own mental state from the jury, and was sentenced to death, the first defendant ever to receive a federal death sentence for a hate crime. Appeals courts upheld that sentence in 2021, and the United States Supreme Court declined to hear a further challenge in 2022; Roof has continued filing motions seeking to vacate the sentence since, none of which have succeeded.
The church itself began planning a permanent memorial years before construction could begin. Designed by architect Michael Arad, best known for the National September 11 Memorial in New York, the Emanuel Nine Memorial centers on a courtyard where two large carved marble benches, shaped to suggest wings, flank a fountain inscribed with the nine victims' names, water spilling from a cross shaped source across the inscriptions below. A planned second phase, the Survivors' Garden, will add stone benches and trees dedicated to the shooting's five survivors, with a sixth tree representing the church itself.
Groundbreaking took place in 2023, and the memorial's first phase is nearing completion, with an opening expected later in 2026, more than a decade after the shooting it commemorates, a monument still under construction on the same ground where the congregation kept worshipping through the years it took to build it.