Attorneys argue over faculty shooter’s destiny: death or jail

By TERRY SPENCER

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. (VFAB) — The prosecutor and defense attorney for Florida school shooter Nikolas Cruz agreed Tuesday that his 2018 attack that killed 17 people was awful, but disagreed in their closing arguments on irrespective of whether it was an act of evil worthy of execution or one particular of a broken man or woman who really should be imprisoned for daily life.

Lead prosecutor Mike Satz and his protection counterpart, Melisa McNeill, painted for the 12 jurors competing pictures of what drove Cruz’s assault at Parkland’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas Higher University on Valentine’s Working day.

For Satz, Cruz was pushed by delinquent individuality dysfunction — in lay conditions, he’s a sociopath. He warrants a demise sentence because “was searching his victims” as he stalked a a few-story classroom creating for seven minutes. He fired his AR-15-type semiautomatic rifle into some victims at close assortment and returning to wounded victims as they lay helpless “to complete them off.”

Satz pointed to Cruz’s online writings and films, where by he talked about his murderous desires this sort of as when he wrote, “No mercy, no queries, double faucet. I am heading to kill a … ton of folks and young children.”

“It is reported that what a person writes and says is a window into their soul,” Satz mentioned as the 3-thirty day period demo neared its conclusion. The killings, he claimed, “were unrelentlessly heinous, atrocious and cruel.”

McNeill stated neither Cruz nor herself has ever denied what he did and that “he knew proper from improper and he chose wrong.” But she said the former Stoneman Douglas college student is “a damaged, mind-broken, mentally ill younger gentleman,” doomed from conception by the heavy ingesting and drug use of his start mom throughout being pregnant. She argued for a sentence of everyday living without parole, assuring them he will never ever stroll absolutely free once again.

“It’s the appropriate thing to do. Mercy is what would make us civilized. Providing mercy to Nikolas will say a lot more about who you are than it will ever say about him,” McNeill told the jury.

Cruz, 24, pleaded guilty a 12 months ago to murdering 14 pupils and three personnel members and wounding 17 other individuals.

The jury will only come to a decision his sentence, and a unanimous vote is needed for dying. Jurors can vote for dying if they consider the prosecution’s mitigating things these kinds of as the several fatalities and the scheduling outweigh the defense’s mitigating components this sort of as his beginning mother’s ingesting. They can also vote for existence out of mercy for Cruz. Deliberations are predicted to commence Wednesday.

Cruz, dressed in an off-white sweater, sat impassively for the duration of the presentations, once in a while exchanging notes with his attorneys. A significant selection of the victims’ mothers and fathers, wives and relatives associates packed their portion of the courtroom, lots of of them weeping through Satz’s presentation. The mother of a murdered 14-calendar year-aged woman fled the courtroom in advance of bursting into loud sobs in the hallway. Just minutes previously, the people experienced greeted every other with smiles, handshakes and hugs.

Satz meticulously went by the murders, reminding the jurors how every sufferer died and how Cruz looked some in the eye before he shot them a number of situations.

“They all realized what was going on, what was likely to occur,” Satz said.

As he experienced throughout the demo, Satz performed security movies of the taking pictures and confirmed shots. He talked about the dying of one 14-yr-old woman. Cruz shot her and then went again to shoot her once more, putting his gun from her upper body.

“Right on her pores and skin. She was shot four times and she died,” Satz said. He then famous a YouTube remark, which jurors observed through the demo, in which Cruz mentioned: “I don’t brain capturing a female in the upper body.”

“That’s just what he did,” Satz explained.

His voice breaking, Satz concluded his two-hour presentation by reciting the victims’ names, then saying that for their murders “the correct sentence for Nikolas Cruz is the dying penalty.”

McNeill throughout her presentation acknowledged the horror Cruz inflicted and said jurors have every single proper to be offended, “but how numerous times have we designed choices primarily based exclusively on anger and regretted it?”

She centered on her perception that large consuming by his birth mom, Brenda Woodard, throughout pregnancy remaining him with fetal alcoholic beverages spectrum disorder. She mentioned that accounts for his weird, troubling and sometimes violent conduct commencing at age 2.

“There is no time in our life when we are additional vulnerable to the will and the whims of a different human currently being than we are escalating and establishing in the wombs of our mothers,” McNeill stated. Woodard “poisoned him in the womb. He was doomed in the womb.”

She stated Cruz’s more and more erratic character remaining his widowed adoptive mother, Lynda Cruz, overwhelmed. He punched holes in partitions when he lost video video games, ruined home furnishings and killed animals. Website visitors explained the house as “a war zone,” McNeill said.

She pleaded with the jurors to give Cruz a life sentence, telling them that even if they are the only holdout they shouldn’t dread what the response will be from the households or the neighborhood.

Gesturing toward the victims’ family members, she stated, “There is no punishment you could ever give Nikolas Cruz that would at any time make him endure as much as all those individuals have and as a great deal as they will go on to suffer each one day.”

“Sentencing Nikolas to demise will not transform that. It will not bring back again those people 17 dead men and women. Sentencing Nikolas to dying will literally provide no purpose other than vengeance,” she claimed. As a substitute, she explained, “Look into your heart. Search into your soul. The appropriate detail right here, not the preferred thing, is a everyday living sentence.”

Cruz’s massacre is the deadliest mass taking pictures that has at any time gone to trial in the U.S. Nine other people in the U.S. who fatally shot at the very least 17 persons died during or immediately soon after their attacks by suicide or police gunfire. The suspect in the 2019 massacre of 23 at an El Paso, Texas, Walmart is awaiting demo.

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Involved Press reporters Freida Frisaro in Miami and Curt Anderson in St. Petersburg, Florida, contributed to this report.