After a months-long trial, a jury in October recommended Nikolas Cruz, 24, be sentenced to life in prison for the February 2018 massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, where he killed 14 students and three school staff members
Circuit Judge Elizabeth Scherer sentenced Cruz to serve a life sentence with no possibility of parole for each of the 17 counts of murder to which he had pleaded guilty, with the sentences to run consecutively.
Scherer also imposed a sentence of life in prison with a minimum of 20 years to serve on 14 of the 17 counts of attempted murder, and life without the possibility of parole for the remaining three counts of attempted murder.
Last month, in a 9-3 vote, a jury leaned toward sending Cruz to death row, but Florida law dictates that anything less than a unanimous vote automatically shifts the sentence to life without parole.
For two days, parents, wives, siblings and other relatives of slain victims and some of the surviving wounded addressed Cruz face to face.
Prosecutors had sought the death penalty, while the defense had asked for life in prison.
The jury’s decision on Oct. 13 shocked family members of victims who were visibly distraught by the verdict.
During the the three-month penalty trial, the defense argued that Cruz is mentally ill and his condition led him to the 2018 Valentine’s Day rampage in which he wielded a semi-automatic rifle at his former school, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.
Cruz will be taken within days to the Florida Department of Corrections, before he is assigned to a maximum-security prison in the state.
Source: kmmo.com, Staff, November 3, 2022
Florida school mass shooter sentenced to life in prison
A jury voted last month to spare Cruz, 24, the death penalty, instead choosing life in prison without possibility of parole for one of the deadliest mass shootings in U.S. history.
Cruz pleaded guilty last year to premeditated murder for his rampage on Feb. 14, 2018, then faced the three-month penalty trial earlier this year.
Broward County Circuit Judge Elizabeth Scherer agreed to a prosecution request to first allow relatives of Cruz’s victims to address the court before the sentence was handed down. The sentencing proceedings began on Tuesday with victim impact statements.
Many victims’ relatives castigated the jury’s decision and criticized a state law requirement that all 12 jurors be unanimous in order to sentence a convicted person to be executed.
“How much worse would the crime have to be to warrant the death penalty?” said Annika Dworet, the mother of 17-year-old victim Nicholas Dworet.
Some relatives also chided Cruz’s defense lawyers, who fruitlessly objected to the judge about the criticism of them and the jurors on Tuesday, noting that Cruz had a constitutional right to legal representation.
Many victims’ relatives directly addressed Cruz, who sat inscrutable behind large spectacles and a COVID-19 mask at a table alongside his public defenders, wearing red prison overalls and handcuffs. He removed his mask when the mother of one of his victims told him keeping it on was disrespectful
Anne Ramsay, the mother of 17-year-old Helena Ramsay, told him he was “pure evil;” Inez Hixon called him a “domestic terrorist” for killing her father-in-law, school athletics director Chris Hixon.
Cruz was 19 at the time of his attack on Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, about 30 miles (50 km) north of the courthouse in Fort Lauderdale. He had been expelled from the school.
Some of the survivors went on to organize a youth-led movement for tighter gun regulations in the United States, which has the highest rate of private gun ownership in the world and where mass shootings have become recurrent.
Cruz spoke only briefly at the hearing, answering the judge’s questions about whether he understood the proceedings.
Samantha Fuentes, who Cruz shot in the leg, asked Cruz if he remembered making eye contact with her when she lay bleeding in her classroom.
“You are a hateful bigot with an AR-15 and a god complex,” she said. “Without your stupid gun, you are nothing.”
Victoria Gonzalez, whose boyfriend 17-year-old Joaquin Oliver was among those Cruz killed, told Cruz they were in the same class together.
“I’m sorry that you never saw the love that the world is capable of giving,” she told Cruz. “My justice does not lie in knowing if you live or if you die. My justice lives in knowing that I experienced a love that a lot of people go their whole lifetimes without experiencing.”
Source: Reuters, Staff, November 3, 2022
Florida | Nikolas Cruz formally sentenced to life in prison
Cruz, shackled and in a red jail jumpsuit, showed no emotion as Circuit Judge Elizabeth Scherer pronounced one-by-one 34 consecutive life sentences — one each for the slain and the 17 he wounded during the Feb. 14, 2018, massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in suburban Fort Lauderdale.
The judge’s voice broke as she read the first sentences, but she gained strength and volume she moved down the list. Scherer had no other choice in sentencing; the jury in Cruz’s three-month penalty trial voted 9-3 on Oct. 13 to sentence him to death, but Florida law requires unanimity for that sentence to be imposed.
Scherer made no comments directed at Cruz beyond what was legally required. Instead, the judge commended the victims’ families and the wounded, calling them strong, graceful and patient.
“I know you are going to be OK, because you have each other,” Scherer said.
Some parents and other family members of the slain wept as she spoke. When she finished and Cruz was led from the courtroom, one father muttered “Good riddance.” They then gathered into groups and hugged each other.
Cruz, 24 and a former Stoneman Douglas student, pleaded guilty last year to the massacre, where he stalked a three-story classroom building for seven minutes, firing 140 shots with a semi-automatic rifle. He will be taken within days to the Florida prison system’s processing center near Miami before he is assigned to a maximum-security facility. Experts say he will likely be placed into protective custody, perhaps for years, before he is released into the prison’s general population.
The sentencing came after the families and the wounded spent two days verbally thrashing Cruz while mourning their loved ones. Many wished him a painful demise and lamented that he could not be sentenced to death. Others said that after leaving court Wednesday, they would try not to think of him again.
“Real justice would be done if every family here were given a bullet and your AR-15 and we got to pick straws, and each one of us got to shoot one at a time at you, making sure that you felt every bit of it,” Linda Beigel Schulman said. Her son, teacher Scott Beigel, was shot in the back as he led students to safety in his classroom.
She told him that his fear would mount, “until the last family member who pulled that last straw had the privilege of making sure that they killed you.”
Fred Guttenberg told the court that last week he finally watched the security video of the shooting, witnessing his 14-year-old daughter Jaime get to within one step of a stairway door and safety when Cruz’s bullet hit her in the spine.
“I walked away from the cemetery realizing that no matter the verdict, nothing changed. Jaime is still in the cemetery,” he said. “I am still a dad who every day dreamed of walking his daughter down the aisle and now I have to face a lifetime of reality that I won’t.”
Victoria Gonzalez, whose boyfriend Joaquin Oliver was murdered as he lay wounded on the floor, told Cruz she had once sat near him in a class. She told him she felt sorry every day for him then, knowing that he struggled. His attorneys said that his birth mother’s heavy drinking left him with brain damage — an assertion the prosecution and the families rejected.
“I was rooting for you,” Gonzalez told Cruz, telling him she would cross her fingers when the teacher asked him a question, hoping he would get it right and feel accomplishment. Back then her life was happy, she had friends: “Joaquin loved me for all my flaws.”
Now, she says, because of what Cruz did, she can no longer get close to anyone because she fears loss, no matter what her outside appearance says.
“I do blame you — not you alone — but definitely you,” she said. She recalled listening to a medical examiner describing Oliver’s gruesome head wound. “I will live with that — and you will live with that indifferently.”
Several parents over the two days said they would petition the Legislature to change the state’s death penalty law so that jury unanimity is no longer needed for a judge to impose a death sentence.
“Do we now have closure? Let me be clear, absolutely not,” said Dr. Ilan Alhadeff, whose 14-year-old daughter Alyssa was killed when Cruz fired into her classroom. “What I see is that the system values this animal’s life over the 17 now dead. Worse, we sent the message to the next killer out there that the death penalty would not be applied to mass killing. This is wrong and needs to be fixed immediately.”
Source: The Associated Press, Terry Spencer, November 3, 2022
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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde