They were not prepared to switch gears and get on with the trial. This sudden about-face caught both the judge and the prosecution by surprise. Originally it had planned to call eighty witnesses but stopped after it had called just twenty-six. They hope to get the jurors to see something of themselves, or if not themselves then some recognizable part of the human condition, in the life that Cruz has led.īut on September 14, the defense unexpectedly rested its case.
His defense lawyers have been putting on a complex mitigation case. Getting jurors to spare the life of one of the “ worst of the worst,” as death penalty supporters like to say, is no easy lift. The question posed by Cruz’s defense is what punishment their guilty but deeply troubled client deserves.
As the Supreme Court said more than fifty years ago, in capital cases those who impose the sentence must consider “any aspect of a defendant’s character or record…proffered as a reason for a sentence other than death.” Instead, during the sentencing trial, or what the journalist Dahlia Lithwick once called a “trial of the heart,” they have focused their attention on who Cruz is and the factors that shaped his life. Like many death penalty defense lawyers before them, Cruz’s lawyers, to their credit, have not downplayed the gravity of the horrors their client inflicted in Parkland, Florida. That is exactly what his defense team is asking them to do as they sit in judgment of the person who perpetrated one of this country’s most brutal mass murders. The ongoing sentencing trial of Nikolas Cruz, the 23-year-old Florida man who in 2018 murdered fourteen students and three staff members at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on Valentine’s Day, will test whether the seven men and five women on the jury hearing his case can hate the sin but muster the courage to spare the life of the sinner.
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