... On the evidence, the prosecution made its case, the jury found unanimously. But at least one juror, and all it took was one, was persuaded by the defense plea for mercy.
Cruz’s guilt was never in question. He confessed to taking 17 lives at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. The jury of five women and seven men found that he deserves the mercy he did not show when he pulled the trigger and ended their lives.
Broward defense lawyer Elias Hilal, who is not associated with the case, said the death penalty in Broward County was effectively overturned. “Nobody in this county can ever get the death penalty again,” he said. “These poor kids were killed in a cold-blooded murder by a monster, yet this killer gets to sit in jail while their parents go home to an empty bedroom.”
Thursday’s decision is unlikely to bring real closure to anyone involved. It won’t return the 17 lives that were lost, the children whose only crime was going to school on Valentine’s Day, or the teachers who tried to save them. It won’t remove the scars from the victims who survived the attack with shrapnel lodged in their skin.
Linda Beigel Schulman, Michael Schulman, Patricia Padauy Oliver and Fred Guttenberg hug in the courtroom as they gather on Thursday before the reading of the verdict in the sentencing trial for confessed Parkland school shooter Nikolas Cruz. (Amy Beth Bennett/South Florida Sun Sentinel) (Amy Beth Bennett/South Florida Sun Sentinel)
It won’t erase the memories of dozens of children who made their way out of the building by stepping over the bodies and blood of their slaughtered classmates.
The jury’s decision won’t reopen the doors of the 1200 building at the Parkland high school campus. It won’t mop the bloodstains from the floors and walls, restore the shattered glass to the classroom doors, or complete the unfinished assignments that were abandoned mid-thought by the terrified students when the firing began.
But it ends the only mystery associated with the case — is this the “worst of the worst” scenario lawmakers envisioned when they made the death penalty legal again in Florida?
Cruz, 19 when he committed the murders, offered almost immediately to plead guilty in exchange for a life sentence. The Broward Public Defender’s Office, which represented him, argued repeatedly that accepting life over death would avoid the spectacle of a trial and the trauma of introducing the evidence.
Prosecutors rejected the offer, refusing to allow the defendant to choose his own fate.
Over the course of four years, the public learned how many times Cruz was identified as a safety threat, and how little was done to address it. ...
“I am very sorry for what I did and I have to live with it every day and that if I were to get a second chance I would do everything in my power to try to help others,” he said. “And I am doing this for you and I do not care if you do not believe me, and I love you and I know you don’t believe me but I have to live with this every day and it brings me nightmares and I can’t live with myself sometimes but I try to push through because I know that’s what you guys would want me to do.”
Family members of the slain victims greeted his confession with undisguised contempt.
Florida law requires a jury’s unanimous recommendation to sentence a murderer to death. Jury selection began on April 4. In all, nearly 1,800 jurors were screened through fits and starts that pushed the trial’s start date further and further into the summer. In the end, 22 were chosen to sit through the trial. Ten were alternates, unaware that their services would no longer be required once deliberations began.
Testimony began July 18, after prosecutor Mike Satz delivered an opening statement outlining the state’s case. In the weeks that followed, the jury was presented with graphic videos and photographs and heart-wrenching testimony from survivors of the Stoneman Douglas massacre.
The prosecution’s case reached a crescendo the week of Aug. 1, when family members began testifying and jurors walked through the building where the mass shooting occurred.
Throughout the prosecution’s case, defense lawyers barely spoke.
There was nothing to dispute, lead defense lawyer Melisa McNeill later told the jury.
The defense case sought to separate the crime from the person who committed it, to present Cruz as “brain-damaged, broken and mentally ill,” deserving of a life sentence, but undeserving of death.
Andrew Pollock, whose daughter Meadow was among the murdered, said his mission was to force accountability to the many who failed, whose intervention might have stopped Cruz from becoming a school shooter.
Reached after the verdict, he said he wasn’t invested in that outcome.
“I feel bad for all the parents that wanted the death penalty,” he said.
As do I.
Maybe their anger can be rechanneled into creating Change that lasts beyond taking another man's life to secure justice for their own losses.
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