Family members whose loved ones were killed in the Parkland school shooting were incensed Thursday after the jury recommended life in prison instead of the death penalty for gunman Nikolas Cruz.
“This should have been the death penalty, 100%,” said Lori Alhadeff, whose 14-year-old daughter Alyssa was killed. “I am so beyond disappointed and frustrated with this outcome. I cannot understand. I just don’t understand.”
Nikolas Cruz, now 24, had already admitted to killing 17 people, including 14 students, and wounding 17 others in the Feb. 14, 2018, massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High in South Florida.
In a three-month penalty trial, prosecutors argued that Cruz should be executed for his actions. Under Florida law, a death sentence would’ve required all 12 jurors to agree. The jury foreman said more than one juror wanted to spare Cruz’s life.
“We went through all the evidence and some of the jurors just felt that was the appropriate sentence,” Benjamin Thomas told a local TV station. “I didn’t vote that way, so I’m not happy with how it worked out, but everyone has the right to decide for themselves.”
The families were less diplomatic.
“Today’s ruling was yet another gut punch for so many of us who devastatingly lost our loved ones,” said Tony Montalto, whose 14-year-old daughter Gina was killed. “Seventeen beautiful lives were cut short, by murder — heinous, pre-planned torturous murder. And the monster that killed them gets to live another day.”
Montalto said his statement was on behalf of Stand With Parkland, an organization he founded that is dedicated to ending school shootings.
Linda Beigel Schulman, whose husband Scott Beigel was killed, said Cruz “should be afraid every second of the day of his life.”
During the trial, Cruz’s attorneys argued that his life should be spared because he suffered from fetal alcohol syndrome triggered by his mother’s heavy drinking during pregnancy.
The argument evidently convinced multiple jurors, but it failed to reach Montalto.
“How can the mitigating factors make this shooter, who they recognized committed this terrible act — acts, plural — shooting, some victims more than once on a pass, pressing the barrel of his weapon to my daughter’s chest — that doesn’t outweigh that poor little what’s-his-name had a tough upbringing?” he asked at a press conference after the verdict.
“Our justice system should have been used to punish this shooter to the fullest extent of the law.”
Other parents directed their anger at the system itself. Lori Alhadeff asked, “What is the death penalty for?”
Fred Guttenberg, whose 14-year-old daughter Jaime was killed in the shooting, said he thought someone predisposed against the death penalty sneaked onto the jury.
“A juror did not tell the truth to get on this jury, and because of that 17 families have been failed,” he said at the press conference.
Guttenberg also criticized how the defense conducted the trial. Defense attorneys rested after calling only 25 of 80 listed witnesses, prompting any angry rebuke from the judge.
Florida is one of 27 states where the death penalty is legal. The state last executed someone in August 2019.
“There are crimes for which the only just penalty is death,” wrote ex-Florida governor and current candidate Charlie Christ, in a message that was retweeted by Guttenberg. “The Parkland families and community deserved that degree of justice.”
With News Wire Services
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We are no longer a country of laws. We now rule by opinion and we can thank the damned’o’crats for destroying the legal system.
This guy will go the way of Jeffrey Epstein and Jeffrey Dahmer who actually ate his victims, both killed in jail by criminals who I find it ironic have a greater sense of justice than the Criminals that now populate the Democrat Criminal Party of social theft and killers of innocence in the womb who believe the death penalty cruel and unusual punishment to people to take children’s lives in mass murders. They have bred an entire generation unable to deal with the reality of evil, becoming the very evil themselves, beginning with Roe v Wade that from childhood on, this generation was taught to ignore the value and sanctity of human life beginning in the womb, and graduated into adulthood in shootings. Just how can Children who witness their siblings being aborted like so much meaningless tissue not become warped when reaching adulthood? The massive unequaled representative killings in black neighborhoods is just the same reflected statistics born and bred in the reflected unequal number of blacks aborted as compared to the rest of the country, planned and primed with the democrat gun of social experimentation, and the planned locations of abortion clinics nearest to neighborhoods of color.They are the party of the damned, and destroyers of the good, whose even prepoosed good ends up turning to evil in results.
THEN why do we need so many law makers, IF LAWS just won’t get enforced once made??
women on the jury just could not kill him
You have to wonder. If killing 17 people – 14 children among them – doesn’t warrant the death penalty, what does. Put this scum in prison with the general population and he will be VERY popular (wink, wink). And he will develop a new gait. Justice to say the least.
TO libtards, nothing does. Unless you’re a fetus in a woman’s belly, then KIll them at will.
Young people nowadays know there are no consequences for bad behavior, be it killing 17 schoolmates, shooting up a NC neighborhood killing 5 including a cop (just yesterday), or being part of a “flash mob” that loots a convenience store (that one was last night in Philly, Wawa decided to put expansion plans on hold in the city, thanks to that and other recent incidents). Until we get some judges and prosecutors with some backbone, mayhem and terror will continue to reign in our streets.
ITS Not just judges though.. ITS PARENTS too, who bought into the lie back in the 90s, ‘stop spanking your kids’..
No juror who was able to convict Cruz on these charges could have voted against the death penalty unless being against the death penalty in all cases. Jury selection failed to remove that juror or jurors.