Linda Beigel Schulman held up a photo collage as the verdict was pronounced. On it portraits of the 17 dead of Parkland, Florida. 14 students and three adults, murdered by Nikolas Cruz, who fired 140 rounds from an AR-15 semi-automatic machine gun at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on February 14, 2018. Beigel Schulman’s son Scott, a teacher, was one of those killed.
More than four years later, the mass murderer was convicted in Fort Lauderdale’s Broward County Courthouse. But not in the way many of the assembled relatives would have wished. The court sentenced Cruz, now 24, to 34 life sentences. A life sentence for each murdered and injured. He doesn’t have to go to death row.
After the three-month trial, the jury voted nine to three in favor of the death penalty, which has been imposed and carried out again in Florida since 1976. 99 people have been killed on behalf of the judiciary in four and a half decades, most recently Gary Ray Bowles with lethal injection in 2019 for murdering six people in 1994. But since 2014, the toughest of penalties has had to be passed unanimously following a decision by the state’s Supreme Court, with three dissenting votes in the Parkland case. The defenders of the confessed perpetrator had pointed out that his mother had consumed alcohol and drugs during pregnancy, which saved the perpetrator’s life. And it widens the debate about the death penalty, which the majority of the world feels is deeply inhuman.
Despite stricter laws, guns are still very easy to get
It sounds and looks awful to read, hear and see of this process. The mothers, fathers, grandparents or siblings are united by the grief, the pain over their dead children, grandchildren, brothers and sisters. More bullet-killed lives in this series of shoots in an America where guns are still easy to get, despite recent tightening laws. For example, not far from Miami, there is a public shooting range just off the highway, advertised with a prominent advertisement and the phrase “hurricane-proof”.
Nikolas Cruz in the courtroom. Three of the five jurors spoke out against the death penalty, they rated it as mitigating that his mother had consumed alcohol and drugs during pregnancy.
(Photo: Amy Beth Bennett/AFP)
Most of the men and women in the court would have wished this Nikolas Cruz dead, in his red prison garb and big glasses. “That would be fairer for the victims,” she quotes New York Times Tony Montalto, whose 14-year-old daughter Gina is among the victims, leaves a commenter asking what the death penalty is for then.
As of 2020, according to recent case law in increasingly conservative Florida, unanimity would no longer be required, but the state law has not yet been changed. “It’s not right,” said Max Schachter, whose son Alex died at 14, “and I will work to right this injustice for the next family.”
A photo from the courtroom shows him crying. Just like Theresa Robinovitz, whose 14-year-old granddaughter Alyssa Alhadeff is also among the dead. She hopes “that every moment you breathe here on earth is miserable and that you repent of your sins and burn in hell”.
Also Martin Duque, 14, Nicholas Dworet, 17, Aaron Feis, 37, Jaime Guttenberg, 14, Christopher Hixon, 49, Luke Hoyer, 15, Cara Loughran, 14, Joaquin Oliver, 17, Alaina Petty, 14, Meadow Pollack, 18 , Helena Ramsay, 17, Carmen Schentrup, 16, and Peter Wang, 15, are all dead.
“True justice would be achieved if every family here got a bullet and your AR-15 and we got to choose straws and we could each shoot you one at a time to make sure you felt every bit of it,” said Beigel Schulman , mother of slain teacher Scott Beigel, 35. Fred Guttenberg, father of slain Jaime, says he thought at his son’s grave: Whatever the verdict, it changes nothing. Debra Hixon, widow of the murdered Christopher, doesn’t care what happens to the convict. He’ll just be a number to her. “They have taken enough from me and my family.”