LIFE IN PRISON FOR PARKLAND SHOOTER

The Parkland shooting was the deadliest high school shooting in American history.

Jurors on Thursday have recommended life in prison without parole for Nikolas Cruz, who pleaded guilty to killing 17 people in the 2018 school massacre in Parkland, Florida. After over four years, Cruz has finally been sentenced.

Family members of the victims frowned and shook their heads as circuit judge Elizabeth Scherer read the recommendation on Thursday.

The 12-person jury came to a decision after over seven hours of deliberations that took place over two days, ending the three-month trial where accounts of the victims’ deaths were retold in graphic detail.

Scherer will formally issue the life sentences on November first.

Relatives, along with the students and teachers Cruz wounded, will be given the opportunity to speak at the sentencing hearing.

Prosecutor pursued the death penalty for Cruz.

In Florida, a death sentence requires a unanimous vote on at least one count.

While jurors found that the aggravating evidence was enough to warrant a possible death penalty for the gunman, at least one believed the mitigating factors outweighed aggravating ones.

Cruz, then 19 and now 24, pleaded guilty in 2021 to killing 17 people and wounding 17 others at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on Feb. 14, 2018.

Defense: Cruz was “broken and brain-damaged.”

In her closing remarks, Assistant Public Defender Melisa McNeill asked jurors to consider not only Cruz’s personal history, describing him as a “broken, brain-damaged, mentally ill young man” who was “poisoned” in the womb through his birth mother’s frequent use of drugs and alcohol during her pregnancy.

McNeill urged jurors to take Cruz’s history of mental illness into account when finalizing their decisions and reasoned that Cruz should be given a life sentence instead of the death penalty.

She urged jurors to choose “courage over comfort” and told them that their determination should not be based on revenge, hate, or anger.