The white supremacist who murdered nine African-Americans after sitting through forty minutes of a Bible class with them has pled guilty on nine counts of murder to avoid a state level trial and another probable conviction that would likely result in a death sentence.

D__ R__*, who shot to death nine people in a historically black church in Charleston, South Carolina, pleaded guilty Monday afternoon to state charges in the killings.

R__ was sentenced to death in January by a federal jury for the June 2015 massacre at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church.

The deal reached in the Charleston County Courthouse includes a life sentence. It means no state trial or sentencing phase will be necessary.

The federal death sentence stands.

“A guilty plea in state court means that if something very, very, very unlikely were to happen at the federal level, the state sentence would take effect and he would serve life in prison. (And no more trials!),” Scarlett A. Wilson, solicitor for the state’s 9th Judicial Circuit, wrote to victims’ families last week.

The convicted mass murderer will be transferred to a federal prison in Indiana where he will sit on federal death row.

* Bearing Arms does not publish the names of mass or spree killers.