Cruz, 23, pleaded guilty last October to committing premeditated murder at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, roughly 30 miles north of Fort Lauderdale, in one of the deadliest school shootings in U.S. history. Cruz murdered 14 students and three staff members.
Melisa McNeil, Cruz’s lead public defender, explained to the 12 Broward County jurors that he should receive life in prison without parole due to mitigating factors including lifelong developmental delays and mental-health disorders that arose from his biological mother’s drug and alcohol abuse throughout pregnancy.
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“Because of that, his brain was irretrievably broken, through no fault of his own,” McNeil explained to the jury.
A defense attorney on Monday implored a Florida jury to spare the life of Nikolas Cruz, who murdered 17 people in a 2018 high school mass shooting in the city of Parkland, mentioning brain damage linked to fetal drug and alcohol exposure as reason not to impose the death penalty.
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Cruz, 23, pleaded guilty last October to committing premeditated murder at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, roughly 30 miles north of Fort Lauderdale, in one of the deadliest school shootings in U.S. history. Cruz murdered 14 students and three staff members.
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Melisa McNeil, Cruz’s lead public defender, explained to the 12 Broward County jurors that he should receive life in prison without parole due to mitigating factors including lifelong developmental delays and mental-health disorders that arose from his biological mother’s drug and alcohol abuse during pregnancy.
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“Because of that, his brain was irretrievably broken, through no fault of his own,” McNeil explained to the jury.
Cruz said when he pleaded guilty that he was “very sorry” and questioned being given a chance to help others.
The start last month of the trial’s penalty phase included testimony from students who were at school that day and cellphone videos in which terrified students cried for help or spoke in hushed whispers as they hid.
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U.S. gun violence gained renewed attention after recent mass shootings. These include one in July at an Independence Day parade outside Chicago that murdered seven people, one in May at a school in Uvalde, Texas, that left 19 children and two teachers dead, and one in May at a supermarket in a predominately Black neighborhood of Buffalo, New York, that murdered 10 people.
President Joe Biden in June signed the first significant federal gun reform legislation in three decades, which he called a rare bipartisan achievement.
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