The crucial question at the Parkland killer’s sentencing trial wasn’t expressed in so many words on the elaborate verdict forms that took more than an hour to read in court Thursday.
Rather, it was how Chief Assistant Public Defender Melisa McNeill phrased it to the jury.
“In a civilized society, do we kill brain-damaged, mentally ill, broken people?” she asked.
Seventeen times, the jury answered “No.”
Painful as it is, it was the right answer.
It surely does not seem so to the families of Nikolas Cruz’s 17 victims, whose grief is without end. Their suffering deserves our sympathy and respect.
But a death sentence for Cruz would only have prolonged their search for closure. The four-plus years it took to get the Parkland massacre to trial would have been a prelude to many more years, if not decades, of appeals, with an uncertain outcome.
Instead, it’s over but for a formal sentencing hearing scheduled for Nov. 1. That will be 17 consecutive life sentences without parole added to the 17 he’s already serving for the victims who survived at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on Feb. 14, 2018.
This could have been the outcome from the outset. But the prosecution rejected the defense’s proposed plea bargain offers that began two days after the killings. Cruz pleaded guilty anyway. His life expectancy in prison may actually be shorter than if the jury had enabled the trial judge, Elizabeth Scherer, to sentence him to death. Like other infamous killers of children, he will be a target of other convicts, and the Department of Corrections will likely need to isolate him.
A lingering question
One question above all lingers after this act of pure evil: If this killer doesn’t deserve death, who does?
Among the 305 people on death row in Florida are people who committed solitary murders, sometimes during a robbery where they had not planned to kill. It abounds with people whose guilt is hardly as clear-cut as his is. Some are arguably as mentally ill as he appears to be, if not more so. In 30 cases, people on death row were exonerated, more than in any other state.
None of America’s death penalty jurisdictions can get it right. The only solution is to abolish it.
Former Florida Supreme Court Justice James E. C. Perry, in his last dissent, noted that 70% of those who were executed in Florida were Blacks who killed whites. In that case, the court’s majority refused to apply retroactively a landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling requiring Florida juries to unanimously find at least one of the reasons, known as aggravating factors, that make a defendant eligible for the death penalty.
The Florida court picked an arbitrary date to apply it. But it had already held that new sentences, like Cruz’s, would require a unanimous jury recommendation for death. The Legislature changed the law to comply.
The court’s new conservative majority repealed the unanimity requirement, effectively inviting the Legislature to allow non-unanimous death verdicts again. The Cruz verdict may encourage legislators to do that, but it would be wrong.
The Cruz jury found at least five aggravating factors in each of the 17 murders.
Mitigating factors
Florida law also requires jurors to decide if there are mitigating factors but does not require that they report what they found. In each of 17 verdicts, one or more jurors did not agree that the aggravating factors outweighed the reasons to spare Cruz’s life.
To have condemned Cruz to death would not necessarily deter another mass murderer. They rarely survive a police response or kill themselves. Cruz, who was 19 when he legally bought his assault weapon in Coral Springs, is a rare exception.
The outcome is also noteworthy because the trial judge had refused to allow the defense to tell the jury of repeated failures by public and private agencies to give Cruz the treatment he needed or alert the public to his danger. The FBI ignored credible warnings that he would be a school shooter. So did an assistant principal at Stoneman Douglas.
Despite that restriction, some jurors apparently agreed with a former neighbor’s testimony that Cruz was never right mentally and suffered from fetal alcohol syndrome, which helped to expose the vast deficiencies in Florida’s mental health system.
Those wide gaps through which Cruz maliciously stepped are the ultimate lesson of this horrific tragedy.
