Gunman Who Killed 17 in Parkland Is Spared the Death Penalty

 

Parkland School Shooting Verdict

Gunman Who Killed 17 in Parkland Is Spared the Death Penalty

 

Nikolas Cruz showed little emotion as the judge read the jury’s decisions one by one. His victims’ families, in contrast, were horrified and baffled as they learned that his life had been spared.

 

By Patricia Mazzei and Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs

Oct. 13, 2022

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/13/us/parkland-trial-verdict-gunman.html

 

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — Nikolas Cruz, the profoundly disturbed young man who carried out a massacre in the hallways of his former high school four years ago, igniting an anti-gun-violence movement led by students raised in an era of mass shootings, should not be condemned to death and instead should spend the rest of his life in prison, a state jury said on Thursday.

 

In a swift decision that stunned many of the victims’ families, the jury of seven men and five women sentenced Mr. Cruz to life in prison without the possibility of parole for all 17 first-degree murder counts, after about seven hours of deliberations in a grueling and often emotional sentencing trial.

 

In each decision, the jurors indicated that prosecutors had convinced them that the killings had been so depraved as to warrant the possibility of the death penalty. But they also indicated that none of the terrible facts about the gunman’s crimes outweighed the circumstances of his deeply troubled life that were the focus of his defense, and so they repeatedly rejected capital punishment.

 

Mr. Cruz, 24, showed little emotion as Judge Elizabeth A. Scherer read the jury’s decisions one by one. His victims’ families, in contrast, were horrified and baffled as they learned over and over again that his life had been spared. Outside the courtroom, they expressed outrage and disbelief and questioned the purpose of the death penalty if it is not imposed on a mass murderer of mostly children. Many had assumed that the trade-off for enduring a painful and protracted trial would be a near-certain death sentence.

 

“What it says to me, what it says to my family, what it says to the other families, is that his life meant more than the 17 that were murdered,” said Debra Hixon, whose 49-year-old husband, Christopher Hixon, an athletic director, was killed on the afternoon of Feb. 14, 2018, in the freshman building of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. “He should give thanks to God that someone had grace and mercy on him that he did not show other people.”

 

Mr. Cruz pleaded guilty last year to fatally shooting 17 people and injuring 17 others in the attack, which galvanized the affluent suburban community and forever linked its name to one of the deadliest school shootings in American history. Some Parkland students formed March for Our Lives, a national organization that has advocated for more than 150 state gun-control laws, including in Florida, where the minimum age to buy firearms was raised to 21.

 

Defense lawyers had argued that Mr. Cruz’s brain was damaged before birth because his biological mother drank heavily, smoked and, according to some witnesses, also abused drugs while she was pregnant with him. That led him to suffer from fetal alcohol spectrum disorder that was never properly diagnosed, the lawyers said, despite his many developmental delays and behavioral problems.

 

Prosecutors had recounted the meticulous planning that Mr. Cruz did to carry out his rampage, showing jurors surveillance video of each victim shot, cellphone videos taken by students under siege and grisly autopsy photos of the dead.

 

The jury foreman, Benjamin Thomas, told CBS Miami that three jurors had voted to spare Mr. Cruz’s life. One of them had been a “hard no” on a death sentence because she believed the defendant to be mentally ill, Mr. Thomas said.

 

He added that jurors had wanted to sleep on their decisions on Wednesday night before returning on Thursday and voting. “It didn’t go the way I would’ve liked or the way I voted, but that’s how the jury system works,” Mr. Thomas told the television station.

 

Florida requires a unanimous vote in order to impose a death sentence.

 

A female juror who voted against the death penalty said in a note to the judge on Thursday that she had been “fair and unbiased” despite accusations from fellow jurors that she had made up her mind before the trial began.

 

“The deliberations were very tense and some jurors became extremely unhappy once I mentioned that I would vote for life,” the juror said in the note, which was filed with the court.

 

“The state had the uphill battle of having to win every juror,” said Bob Jarvis, a law professor at Nova Southeastern University in Davie, Fla., adding that he had long believed prosecutors in the Parkland case had the more difficult task.

 

After jurors walked into the courtroom to deliver the verdict on Thursday morning, two men on the panel hunched forward and held their heads in their hands. Several jurors reached for tissues during the judge’s nearly hourlong reading of their decisions. Two dabbed at tears.

 

The trial was a rare legal proceeding against a gunman in a mass shooting; most either kill themselves or die in a confrontation with the police during their attacks. In 2015, jurors sentenced the man who killed 12 people in a movie theater in Aurora, Colo., to life in prison with no chance of parole, rejecting prosecutors’ efforts to have him executed. Two years later, a federal jury recommended death for the white supremacist who killed nine Black churchgoers in Charleston, S.C.

 

The man accused of killing 23 people in 2019 inside a Walmart in El Paso is awaiting trial after pleading not guilty.

 

Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, a Republican, said he was disappointed in Mr. Cruz’s life sentence.

 

“I just don’t think anything else is appropriate except a capital sentence in this case,” he told reporters, adding that he was frustrated about how long it took to resolve the case after the 2018 shooting.

 

Legal experts say that while it is difficult to extrapolate from one case, the Parkland verdict comes at a time when people are growing more wary of the death penalty. A slight majority of Americans still support capital punishment, but that proportion has dropped significantly since the 1990s; so has the number of state executions.

 

Before 2016, Florida was one of only three states in which juries could recommend death by a simple majority. But the U.S. Supreme Court struck down part of Florida’s law in early 2016. The next year, the State Legislature adopted a new sentencing law requiring a unanimous jury vote for a judge to impose the death penalty.

 

Mr. Cruz had been willing to plead guilty in exchange for a life sentence since shortly after the shooting. But the chief prosecutor in Broward County at the time, Michael J. Satz, a Democrat, decided to pursue the death penalty. Many of the victims’ families in the liberal bastion of Broward County wanted capital punishment in the case.

 

The defendant ultimately entered a guilty plea despite the possibility of a death sentence. Mr. Satz, who is no longer the elected state attorney, remained the lead prosecutor on the case. In the courtroom on Thursday, Mr. Satz, a veteran prosecutor with more than five decades of experience, looked confounded at the outcome.

 

His successor, Harold F. Pryor, who does not support capital punishment, did not take questions on Thursday. “To the survivors, please know that you are not forgotten in this,” he said in a statement.

 

Seventeen people were killed and 17 injured in the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., in 2018.Credit...Saul Martinez for The New York Times

 

Gordon Weekes, the chief public defender in Broward County and a Democrat, said Thursday was not a day of celebration.

 

“The jurors decided this case after a number of days of very, very difficult, traumatic evidence,” he said. “They heard it all and they weighed it all and they rendered their verdict.”

 

The seven hours of deliberations took place almost entirely on Wednesday, with jurors reaching a decision by 9:30 a.m. on Thursday. During their deliberations, they had asked for the cross-examination of a defense neuropsychologist’s testimony to be read back to them.

 

They had also asked to inspect the defendant’s semiautomatic rifle, which had been rendered inoperable.

 

As Judge Scherer read the jury’s decisions, the victims’ families became increasingly angry and disturbed. They shook their heads and whispered to one another. Later, as they left the courtroom, some burst into sobs. So did Mr. Cruz’s lead defense attorney, Melisa McNeill.

 

Judge Scherer set the formal sentencing for Nov. 1. Victims’ families will be given the chance to speak beforehand. The judge has no power to overrule the jury and impose the death penalty.

 

In their decisions, jurors said prosecutors had proven beyond a reasonable doubt seven aggravating factors out of 16 in Florida law that can justify the death penalty. Aggravating factors included that the murders were especially heinous, atrocious or cruel, or were committed in a cold, calculated and premeditated manner, among others.

 

But jurors said the aggravating factors did not outweigh the mitigating circumstances that shaped Mr. Cruz’s life, including the death of his adoptive mother from pneumonia four months before his attack.

 

Mr. Cruz arrived at the sprawling campus of Stoneman Douglas High around dismissal time on Valentine’s Day in 2018, armed with a legally purchased semiautomatic rifle and more than 300 rounds of ammunition. He charged into Building 12, shooting 139 rounds down hallways and into classrooms. He fired at students who tried to flee, and sometimes doubled back to make sure his victims were dead.

 

He killed 14 students and three faculty members in just under six minutes — stopping only after he could not find anyone else to kill, he said later — before escaping on foot.

 

Killed in the shooting were Alyssa Alhadeff, 14; Scott Beigel, 35; Martin Duque, 14; Nicholas Dworet, 17; Aaron Feis, 37; Jaime Guttenberg, 14; Luke Hoyer, 15; Cara Loughran, 14; Gina Montalto, 14; Joaquin Oliver, 17; Alaina Petty, 14; Meadow Pollack, 18; Helena Ramsay, 17; Alex Schachter, 14; Carmen Schentrup, 16; Peter Wang, 15, and Mr. Hixon.

 

“The monster that killed them gets to live another day,” Tony Montalto, Gina’s father, said on Thursday, calling the jury’s decision “pretty unreal.”

 

“The defendant accomplished his goal,” said Patricia Oliver, Joaquin’s mother. “The defendant saw the families suffering.”

 

But she implored her family and others to pull through.

 

“We’ve got to keep living,” she said. “We’re not going to let the defendant take more away from us.”

 

Audra D. S. Burch, Jacey Fortin Michael Majchrowicz and James C. McKinley Jr. contributed reporting. Jack Begg and Sheelagh McNeill contributed research.

 

Patricia Mazzei is the Miami bureau chief, covering Florida and Puerto Rico. She writes about breaking news, politics, disasters and the quirks of life in South Florida. She joined The Times in 2017 after a decade at The Miami Herald.

 

Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs reports on national news. He is from upstate New York and previously reported in Baltimore, Albany, and Isla Vista, Calif. @nickatnews