MIAMI — A jury’s decision to hand out a life sentence for Parkland mass killer Nikolas Cruz will make it even more difficult to secure death sentences in the future — and could also spur Florida lawmakers to consider changing the state’s capital punishment law, legal experts say.
Cruz’s was the most high-profile capital case to go to sentencing since Florida lawmakers changed the law in 2017 to require juries to be unanimous in recommending execution, a requirement shared by nearly every other death-penalty state in the United States. With the trial being watched worldwide, and with ample evidence of the brutality of Cruz’s rampage, many legal observers had believed Cruz’s defense team faced an uphill battle in convincing a jury to spare his life.
So the 12-person jury’s decision Thursday to impose life without the possibility of parole surprised many.
One juror was adamant against a death sentence, and two others joined in the vote for life, Benjamin Thomas, the foreperson told Herald news partner WFOR-CBS4. “There was one with a hard no — she couldn’t do it — and there was another two that ended up voting the same way,” Thomas said.
Under Florida law, all that’s needed is one vote for a defendant to be spared.
One of the jurors who voted for life, in a letter to the judge, disputed supposed chatter from other jurors that she had already made up her mind on the sentence before the trial. “This allegation is untrue and I maintained my oath to the court that I would be fair and unbiased,” she wrote. “The deliberations were very tense and some jurors became extremely unhappy once I mentioned that I would vote for life.”
“I think people who are in a position of power, who are spending the dollars on seeking the death penalty, are going to rethink and reweigh at least some of their cases,” said South Florida capital defense attorney Terry Lenamon.
Former Miami-Dade senior homicide prosecutor Abe Laeser predicted that across Florida, defense attorneys will now point to the Parkland verdict when trying to get State Attorneys to waive the death penalty. “A lawyer will say, ‘My client didn’t shoot 17 school kids with 139 bullets. If that guy doesn’t deserve it, my guy doesn’t deserve it,’” Laeser said.
He added: “Across the board, prosecutors who are pro-death penalty are going to be in a difficult position to make their cases to trial juries and trial judges.”
Cruz, 24, pleaded guilty to 17 counts of first-degree murder, and 17 counts of attempted murder for the rampage at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High in February 2018. The trial was held only to decide on whether Cruz should be sent to Death Row or to prison for life.
The mass shooting became a high-profile flash point for everything from gun control, arming teachers on campuses, and police response to active shooters.
Within days of Cruz’s arrest, the Broward Public Defender’s Office offered to have him plead guilty and accept a life term if prosecutors waived the death penalty. Then-State Attorney Mike Satz chose to seek death, a decision supported by most of the parents of the slain children, some of whom have become well-known advocates for school safety.
Cruz’s case was unusual in that most mass shooters never make it to trial because they are killed on the scene. But Thursday’s decision was not wholly unprecedented — in 2015, a Colorado jury rejected the death penalty for a man who killed 12 in a movie theater; one juror told NBC that one holdout refused to vote for death.
The death penalty in Florida has a thorny history in recent years.
For decades, jurors in South Florida only had to issue a bare minimum — at least seven of 12 votes — to recommend execution as punishment for first-degree murder. The judges would then find whether “aggravating circumstances” existed for the death penalty, and officially mete out the sentence.
But then in 2016, the U.S. Supreme Court, in Hurst. v. Florida, struck down Florida’s capital sentencing system, saying juries, not judges, needed to be the ones “to find each fact necessary to impose a sentence of death.” The Florida Supreme Court later ruled that juries needed to prove the “aggravating” factors beyond a reasonable doubt, that they outweighed any mitigating circumstances — and they needed to be unanimous in their findings.
By 2017, the Florida Legislature changed the law to reflect the Florida Supreme Court’s ruling — the system that was in place for Cruz’s sentencing trial.
“The law that was initiated by the Florida legislature is set up to fail. They set it up for a minority veto,” said retired Miami-Dade prosecutor Gail Levine. "They did not address a majority decision which is perfectly legal according to the United States Supreme Court. It’s a very sad day in American Justice.”
In 2020, the Florida Supreme Court stunned the criminal justice community when it reversed it’s own 2016 court ruling and concluded that a unanimous jury would no longer be required to sentence someone to death in Florida. By then, the high court had changed drastically — three liberal and moderate justices reached mandatory retirement age and were replaced by Gov. Ron DeSantis with conservative jurists.
Still, the Florida Legislature chose not to reverse the law. Alabama is the only state to require a simple majority to impose a capital sentence. Every other state, and the federal government, now require a unanimous verdict to sentence someone to death.
Under the current law, capital juries are tasked with weighing beyond a reasonable doubt whether that the state proved “aggravating factors.” In Cruz’s case, that include the “heinous, atrocious or cruel” nature of the massacre, the calculated and premeditated nature of the crime, that Cruz had previous felony convictions and he committed the crime during a burglary.
Jurors found prosecutors proved the “aggravators.” But at least one juror decided they didn’t outweigh Cruz’s “mitigating” factors — a long list of life circumstances that included Cruz suffering brain damage from his birth mother’s excessive drinking, having been bullied, and having a slew of disorders and mental illnesses.
Broward Public Defender Gordon Weekes, a death-penalty opponent, urged the community to respect the jury’s decision.
“In this process we have developed to procedurally kill somebody, it’s recognized that compassion, grace, empathy should be given great weight,” Weekes said. “The jurors followed their duty and they were given instructions and they followed those instructions. Whatever they felt that compelled them to not seek death and grant the grace of life, they rendered their verdict.”
Parents of the murdered students were angry at what they saw was a flawed legal system.
“I think anyone planning a shooting now sees a path to avoid the death penalty,” said Fred Guttenberg, whose 14-year-old daughter Jaime died in the massacre.
Dr. Ilan Alhadeff, whose daughter Alyssa died at MSD, said he was “disgusted” with the legal system. “The jurors let us down,” he said.
Whether the Florida Legislature moves to change the law remains to be seen.
“You’re going to see outrage and politicians calling for judges to override jurors and go back to something less than unanimous for a death sentence,” said Miami defense lawyer Philip Reizenstein. “Mark my words. The Legislature will call for changing the death penalty statute.”
On Thursday, legislators offered mixed reactions to the Cruz verdict, but said the jury system worked as it was intended.
“I don’t think the Legislature needs to do anything,” said Sen. Jeff Brandes, a St. Petersburg Republican and supporter of a unanimous jury. “Ultimately these things are up for a jury to decide and the state presented its case, the defense presented its case, and the jury believed that, based on the totality of circumstances that the penalty should be life in prison.”
“It’s still a death sentence,’” Brandes said. “He will still die in prison. The death is certain. The timing is the question.”
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(Miami Herald staff writer Charles Rabin contributed to this report.)
