Less than 72 hours after 17 people were gunned down at a Florida high school, attorneys for the man who pulled the trigger let it be known their client was willing to plead guilty and accept a life sentence–if prosecutors were willing to take the death penalty off the table. It seemed to be a reasonable proposition. After all, the facts are not in serious dispute, so why hold a trial when the sole purpose would be to decide the sentence?
Well, it seems that prosecutors in Broward County aren’t yet of that mind. On Tuesday, they announced that they will seek to have Nikolas Cruz put to death for his Valentine’s Day rampage at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, near Fort Lauderdale.
Cruz was indicted last week on 17 counts of first-degree murder and 17 counts of attempted first-degree murder. Read the indictment here.
A Florida grand jury returned a 34 count indictment against Florida school shooter Nikolas Cruz. He is charged with 17 counts of premeditated murder in the first degree and 17 counts of attempted murder in the first degree. pic.twitter.com/RceXVT2Dmm
— Rosa Flores (@RosaFlores) March 7, 2018
Less than a week after winning that indictment, Broward County state’s attorney Michael Satz formally announced that he intends to seek the death penalty. Read the filing here. Among the aggravating factors are multiple murder, the fact that the murders were committed during a burglary, the “great risk of death to many persons” Cruz’ actions created, that the murders were committed in “a cold, calculated, and premeditated matter,” and that they were “especially heinous, atrocious, or cruel.”
Satz had dropped a very loud hint last month that he was mulling the death penalty. He believed this case was “certainly the type of case the death penalty was designed for.”
Apparently he hadn’t been paying attention when Broward County public defender Howard Finkelstein stated that Cruz wanted to plead guilty in order to allow the community to start what will likely be a very long healing process. Indeed, in the event of a guilty plea, the sentencing hearing will be about the victims and the survivors, rather than about Cruz’ myriad mental issues and the red flags that were missed in past years.
When Finkelstein learned of this latest move from prosecutors, he announced that he will have Cruz “stand mute” to the charges if Satz isn’t willing to take the death penalty off the table. That is, he will not enter a formal plea, but under Florida law the judge will likely enter a plea of not guilty on his behalf.
Finkelstein says that he doesn’t want to anger the survivors or the families of Cruz’ victims with the “fiction” of hearing Cruz plead not guilty. At the same time, however, Finkelstein said that “we can’t plead guilty while death is still on the table.”
That’s the only course Finkelstein can take at this point. Any defense attorney who allows his or her client to plead guilty with a death sentence hanging over them might as well be pushing that client out the window.
Now the ball is in Satz’ court. Is he willing to pursue the death penalty despite Cruz stating numerous times through his attorneys that he wants to plead guilty? If he is, he will prove beyond any doubt that there is a fundamentally un-American corollary to the main argument advanced for the death penalty–that certain crimes that are so heinous that those who commit them forfeit their right to live. As we learned in the cases of Dzokhar Tsarnaev and Dylann Roof, apparently that also means that certain crimes are so heinous that those who commit them effectively forfeit the right to surrender as well.
It seems that in recent years, too many people have forgotten that no one is below the law. Those who are accused of crime still have rights that must be respected–even if, like Cruz, they are manifestly guilty. Unfortunately, it looks like quite a few people need that lesson reinforced, judging by coverage of Satz’ announcement from WFOR-TV in Miami. Watch here.
A number of Stoneman Douglas graduates agreed with the decision to pursue the death penalty, saying that Cruz didn’t deserve to live. It’s hard to believe they haven’t heard that Cruz wants to plead guilty. In this case, if Cruz isn’t allowed to do so, sending him to the gurney will be a particularly egregious case of punishing one act of barbarism with another.
Let’s be clear. Cruz does not deserve to walk the streets again. But in the absence of something I haven’t heard or seen, there is no defensible reason to drag this out any further with a death penalty case that may not only take a year to even come to trial. And that’s before we consider that it will likely dragged out over several more years with the all-but-certain appeals.
The best way to allow the victims to heal will be to allow Cruz to plead guilty in return for 34 consecutive life sentences. Then, he will die in prison, and go before the Supreme Judge for whatever further sentence that he has in mind.
(featured image courtesy Formulanone, part of public domain)
