FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — The prosecution spent three weeks telling jurors how Nikolas Cruz murdered 14 students and three staff members at a Florida high school four years ago. Now his attorneys will get their chance to present why they believe he did it, hoping to get him sentenced to life without parole instead of death.
Melisa McNeill, Cruz’s lead public defender, is expected to give her opening statement Monday, having deferred its presentation from the start of the trial a month ago.
She and her team will then begin laying out their 23-year-old client’s life history: his birth mother’s abuse of alcohol and cocaine during her pregnancy, leading to possible fetal alcohol syndrome; his severe mental and emotional problems; his alleged sexual abuse by a “trusted peer;” the bullying he endured; and his adoptive father’s death when he was 5 and his adoptive mother’s four months before his Feb. 14, 2018, attack at Parkland’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.
McNeill’s decision to delay her opening statement appeared part of a broader strategy to not deny or lessen anything prosecutors told jurors about Cruz’s massacre — he pleaded guilty in October to 17 counts of first-degree murder. This trial is only to decide his sentence; the seven-man, five woman jury will consider whether the prosecution’s aggravating circumstances “outweigh” the defense’s mitigating factors.
The defense is “going to say, ‘Look, you saw what happened — we are not going to argue that. It was horrible, that was awful, that was horrific, whatever adjectives you want to use,” said David S. Weinstein, a Miami defense attorney and former prosecutor. But then the defense will add: “He never had a chance and, because of that, his poor victims never had a chance.’”
This is the deadliest U.S. mass shooting to ever reach trial. Nine other gunmen who killed at least 17 people died during or immediately after their shootings, either by suicide or police gunfire. The suspect in the 2019 slaying of 23 people at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, is awaiting trial.
During the prosecution’s case, McNeill’s team never cross-examined any teacher or student who witnessed the slayings and only had brief, mild exchanges with a few other witnesses.
They asked one teacher from a classroom where no one was shot about the lack of a security monitor in the three-story building where the slayings happened. When the gun store owner who sold Cruz…
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