FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — The courtroom is closed. Pretrial hearings in the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School mass shooting case came to an anti-climactic end Wednesday.
The next time the room is opened to the public, confessed murderer Nikolas Cruz, 23, will be facing a jury that has the power to spare his life or recommend his execution.
Wednesday’s hearing before Broward Circuit Judge Elizabeth Scherer was expected to be a lengthy analysis of mental health evidence that the jury may or may not be allowed to hear. But a key witness wasn’t available, leaving the judge, prosecutors and defense lawyers with nothing left to debate before Monday’s scheduled opening statements.
Unable to proceed with the hearing, the judge tied up a few loose ends. Among them was an agreement between defense lawyers and the media to limit close-ups of the defense table so Cruz can talk to his lawyers without wondering who’s reading his lips.
The courtroom next opens on Monday morning, ending a pretrial era that once seemed would go on endlessly, defying the judge’s efforts to move things along.
The mass shooting took place on Valentine’s Day 2018. Cruz took 17 lives at the Parkland high school. According to a video he made shortly beforehand, he wanted to take more. He ended up wounding 17 others, not counting the students and faculty he traumatized for life.
From the start, it was clear that the defense would focus on mental health issues. The defendant’s guilt was never really at issue or contested in any meaningful way. But he is entitled to a defense, and the Broward Public Defender’s Office was determined to protect his constitutional rights. Sparing the defendant’s life was always the endgame — a standing offer to plead guilty in exchange for 34 life sentences was never accepted by the Broward State Attorney’s Office, which took the position that a jury, not a lawyer, should decide Cruz’s fate.
The case was assigned randomly to Scherer, who had never dealt with a case this complex or publicized. But death penalty cases are the most scrutinized in the legal system, and judges with more experience have overseen less complex cases only to find their rulings second-guessed by appeals courts with the power to overturn sentences.
Scherer began setting trial dates more than two years ago but was repeatedly stymied — by routine delays, by the volume of victims and witnesses, by the COVID pandemic, and by the number of expert witnesses it will take to try to make some sense of a senseless tragedy.
Last fall, Cruz and his lawyers dropped any pretense that a trial to determine his guilt was ever necessary. The defendant pleaded guilty, clearing the way for the only question with an answer that’s not a foregone conclusion: life or death?
Prosecutors led by former State Attorney Mike Satz, defense lawyers led by Assistant Public Defender Melisa McNeill, and the judge began screening jurors in April. Most could not commit to the anticipated three months it will take to hear the evidence. Of those who could, some knew too much about the case or had feelings about the death penalty that prohibited them from being fair to one side or the other.
Scherer and the lawyers eventually agreed to 22 jurors who could be impartial, who could vote for death but seriously consider life. They will be subjected to the crime scene photos, videos, gruesome autopsy details, heart-wrenching accounts of the lives that were lost, details about the defendant’s struggles growing up, the traumas he experienced. They will, likely, walk in the killer’s footsteps along the halls of the high school building.
Defense lawyers won’t be permitted to use some arguments about the failures of the justice, education and mental health systems to neutralize the defendant as a threat. Prosecutors won’t be allowed to include every photo or video that depicts the horror of what the shooter did at Stoneman Douglas.
But the jurors will see all the evidence the judge allows, the evidence the law requires for them to make an informed decision.
Starting Monday.
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