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creativitytoexplore · 1 year

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Parkland shooter's victims face him in court once more before he's sentenced to life in prison | CNN

Parkland shooter’s victims face him in court once more before he’s sentenced to life in prison | CNN

CNN — Parkland school massacre gunman Nikolas Cruz will be formally sentenced this week to life in prison – but not until the families of those he killed in 2018 have one more opportunity to face him in court. “You stole him from us, and you did not receive the justice that you deserved,” Debra Hixon, the widow of victim Christopher Hixon, told Cruz in the first statement Tuesday morning,…

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theusarticles · 1 year

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'You don't know me, but you tried to kill me.' Parkland victims and loved ones get last word before shooter sentenced to life in prison | CNN

‘You don’t know me, but you tried to kill me.’ Parkland victims and loved ones get last word before shooter sentenced to life in prison | CNN

CNN — Anguished survivors of the Parkland school shooting and grieving relatives of victims faced the gunman in court before he’s sentenced to life in prison, testifying Tuesday about the loved ones and sense of security he stole from them, and expressing anger over a jury’s decision not to recommend he be put to death. “You don’t know me, but you tried to kill me,” teacher Stacey Lippel told…

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michaeljfox666 · 3 months

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Parkland trial: Nikolas Cruz hoped victims would hug him during massacre...

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thedreadpiratejames · 2 years

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Nikolas Cruz bought the AR-15 that he used to kill 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School because it was “cool-looking.” That’s what he told a Broward Sheriff’s detective, according to court documents.

It was cool-looking.

Cruz’s trial isn’t over yet. The prosecution has rested, and the defense is making its case against the death penalty, after his guilty plea. But even as the jury continues its heartbreaking job, one so agonizing it would be beyond the endurance of many, the AR-15-style gun marketed as “America’s rifle” continues to plague us all.

Cruz chose the same style of weapon as the shooter in Uvalde, the one in Las Vegas, the one at Pulse in Orlando, the one at Sandy Hook, the one in Buffalo, the one in Highland Park, Illinois. These are guns that trace their roots to the Vietnam War. They’re designed to kill lots of people and to look pretty much the same as ones used in the military.

It makes us numb, that list of shootings. But how many of us would still feel that way — could still feel that way — if we’d seen what the jurors in the Cruz trial have had to see? They don’t have the luxury of averting their eyes from the carnage. They can’t duck from the reality of what this country allows: Cruz purchased his weapon legally.

That has to change.

The graphic photos of human beings’ destruction — the tiny entrance wound, the gaping, obscene exit wound — were shielded from the public, considered too awful for most of us to contemplate. But the jurors deciding Cruz’s fate had to see them. Reporters covering the case also viewed them, including David Ovalle.

Ovalle is the Miami Herald’s veteran court reporter. He’s seen some of the worst things that humans can do to each other. But even he struggled to comprehend the horrific damage depicted in the photos.

“For me, the exit wounds were so jarring to view,” he said. “It’s hard to even describe them, because the descriptions of gaping wounds, ragged flesh and deep-red-colored holes just don’t do enough to convey the devastation caused by these weapons of war.”

He talked about one boy, shot eight times, with exit wounds on his forearm — “a massive hole of ragged flesh” — and one of his legs. And about a girl, lying on the floor in front of a classroom lectern, “her eyes wide open as if she’s in pain, her mouth slightly open.” The side of her head is missing, her brain pulverized by a high-velocity bullet.

None of us should have to know about the damage that high-velocity bullets can do. And yet, as the shootings continue, so many of us do.

‘Snowstorm’ of damage Medical examiners have offered more grim lessons during this trial. They told jurors that the bullets that AR-15-style weapons use are created to inflict massive internal damage. Forensic pathologists testified about how the bullets tore through flesh and hit bone, creating a “snow storm” of bullet fragments peppering the person’s insides, often fatally.

As former Broward chief medical examiner Craig Mallak described it, “It’s a very small bullet, but it’s moving at 3,000 feet per second. There’s so much energy with these bullets. It just tears skin, bones, organs.” It’s a path 20 times to 30 times the size of the actual bullet, he said.

He performed the autopsy on 14-year-old Cara Loughran, who suffered three wounds: one small entry wound to the left upper back and two gaping exit wounds in the upper chest.

One bullet entered the rib area of 14-year-old Alaina Petty. “After that, the bullet was fragmented into multiple fragments that perforated the lungs, liver, kidney and exits on the left lateral side of the torso,” Associate Medical Examiner Iouri Boiko testified.

Meadow Pollack’s wounds were catastrophic. The 18-year-old was shot seven times, one fracturing her spine. A bullet that grazed her opened a five-inch gash on her skull. It wasn’t a direct hit. But the energy of the bullet was so powerful, she had no chance.

Marketing works This style of weapon isn’t popular by accident — it’s marketing. The Washington Post recently published a story outlining how one of the manufacturers of AR-15-style rifles tried to run an ad during the Super Bowl, knowing the NFL would probably reject it but ready to launch accusations of censorship and hypocrisy. The ad was rejected. And the counterattack was “by far” the most successful marketing the company had ever had, one company exec said.

The United States banned assault weapons before, from 1994 until 2004. In that 10-year period, mass-shooting deaths were reduced, according to at least one study, published in 2019 in the Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery. In July, the House passed new assault-weapons ban legislation, largely along party lines. It’s unlikely to advance in the evenly split Senate, but at least it is some recognition that the Second Amendment doesn’t confer unlimited rights.

And there is support from the White House. President Biden, in a Pennsylvania speech on safer communities and gun control Tuesday, said the county “is awash in weapons of war.” Parents whose children died in the Uvalde shooting, he said, had to supply DNA for identification, “because the AR-15 just rips the body apart.”

Still-life horror Jurors in the Parkland case are doing what no one should have to do. Instead of shielding themselves from the dreadfulness of this mass shooting, they have to immerse themselves in it. They’ve listened to the anguished parents, siblings and friends. They’ve visited the still-life horror of Building 12 at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, preserved since 2018 for the trial: dried pools of blood on the floor, overturned chairs, discarded headphones, a chess game still in the middle of play, broken glass that still crunches underfoot.

And they’ve seen those photos, the nightmarish pictures of slaughter four years ago on Valentine’s Day committed by someone who thought an AR-15 looked “cool.”

There have been so many shootings. We try to preserve our own sanity by turning away, afraid of having those images of blood and terror and viciousness branded into our consciousness forever.

But maybe we shouldn’t turn away. Maybe if all of us, including our elected officials, had to see those photos, pictures out of our worst nightmares, we could build some kind of consensus, again, on something that seems so simple it shouldn’t need saying: Weapons of war have no place in a civilized society.

#emphasis added #ban assault weapons now #ban assault weapons #gun control now #gun control #gun culture #gun violence

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dontmeantobepoliticalbut · 1 year

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Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is expected to sign a bill on Friday allowing juries to recommend the death penalty in capital cases on an 8-4 vote, a move spurred by the less-than-unanimous vote that led to the Parkland school shooter being sentenced to life in prison.

The state's Republican-led House of Representatives approved the measure with an 80-30 vote on Thursday, following the Republican-controlled state Senate's approval in March.

If the Republican Governor signs the bill into law, Florida prosecutors trying capital felony cases would need to convince only two-thirds of the 12-member jury that someone who is convicted deserves the death penalty, rather than a unanimous decision by a jury.

The change only affects the penalty phase of capital trials. It would have no effect on the requirement for a jury's unanimous vote to convict a defendant.

DeSantis has pushed for the legislation since October when he said he was "very disappointed" after a jury could not come to a unanimous decision on giving a death sentence to Nikolas Cruz, who killed 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland in 2018.

Three jurors voted to spare Cruz, and by default his sentence was life in prison without the possibility of parole, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

If the bill becomes law, Florida would join Alabama as the only states where a unanimous jury decision is not required, the center noted.

Tony Montalto, whose daughter Gina was killed in the Parkland shooting, has been pushing for Florida lawmakers to change the jury requirement.

"Because of the jury's incorrect decision ... the victims, my beautiful daughter, her 13 classmates and her three teachers did not get the justice that they deserve," Montalto said during an interview on WPLG, an ABC affiliate in South Florida, in March.

DeSantis, widely thought to be weighing a 2024 presidential campaign, has accelerated efforts to build his national profile, especially around crime and justice issues. In February, he traveled to New York, Chicago and Philadelphia to speak to law enforcement groups on criminal justice matters.

Legal and ethical questions have swirled around capital punishment in the United States in recent years as states have found it difficult to procure drugs to carry out the death penalty through lethal injections. Several executions have been botched in recent years.

In 2017, Florida passed a law that required death penalties to be imposed only after a unanimous recommendation by a jury.

The law came after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down an earlier state law, saying it unconstitutionally let judges determine the facts that would lead to a death sentence, rather than juries.

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queersturbate · 2 years

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completely off base from my usual content, but for anyone who doesn't know- the 2017 Parkland High School mass shooter is currently in front of a jury awaiting sentencing. Five fucking years later. Depending on the votes he will either get life without parole or the death penalty. If even one juror votes for life, that's what he'll get.

i haven't seen many people talk about it because of the disturbing amount of mass shootings America has had in the past five years, but this incident is the deadliest school shooting now, surpassing columbine. I was in high school when it happened, when the protests and school walkouts and everything were happening. This is what started the never again movement and a bloody call for more gun control. I feel like people would be interested in knowing.

#hearing the witnesses testimonies is fucking sickening #i hope they do the firing squad on him #gun control #never again #tw mass shooting

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beardedmrbean · 2 years

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Oct 13 (Reuters) - Jurors determined Thursday that Nikolas Cruz should be sentenced to death for a 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Florida, that killed 17 people.

Jurors determined in at least one of the murders that there were aggravating factors that would support a death sentence, but in other cases they did not.

Cruz, 24, had pleaded guilty last year to premeditated murder at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. He used a semi-automatic rifle to kill 14 students and three staff members in one of the deadliest school shootings in American history.

The prosecution during the three-month sentencing trial had argued Cruz's crime was both premeditated as well as heinous and cruel, which are among the criteria that Florida law establishes for deciding on a death sentence.

Cruz's defense team had acknowledged the severity of his crimes, but asked jurors to consider mitigating factors including lifelong mental health disorders resulting from his biological mother's substance abuse during pregnancy.

Under Florida law, a death sentence could only have been handed down if jurors had unanimously recommended he be executed. The only other option was life in prison.

Cruz, who at the time of the shooting was 19 and had been expelled from the high school, had apologized for his crimes and asked to be given a life sentence without the possibility of parole in order to dedicate his life to helping others.

The sentencing proceedings included testimony from survivors of the shooting as well as cellphone videos in which terrified students cried for help or spoke in hushed whispers as they hid.

The Parkland shooting had led to renewed calls for tighter gun control in the United States.

U.S. gun violence gained renewed attention following mass shootings this year at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, that left 19 children and two teachers dead, and another at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, that killed 10 people.

#nunyas news

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ausetkmt · 1 year

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‘A law and order state’: DeSantis details push for tough-on-crime laws in Florida

Florida should get even tougher on crime — from reforming the state’s death penalty laws, to introducing heavier penalties for child sex offenders, to cracking down on the sale of fentanyl made to look like candy, Gov. Ron DeSantis said Thursday.

“Don’t take safe communities for granted,” DeSantis said during a news conference in Miami at the Miami Police Benevolent Association. A “Law & Order” sign was affixed to the lectern from which he spoke. “We are a law and order state.”

Among his plans he said that will be presented to the state Legislature:

Citing the outcome of Parkland’s high school shooter’s case, the state will consider requiring a supermajority vote of a jury for a criminal to get the death penalty. Under current law, a jury has to be unanimous in recommending a death sentence. A single juror is all it takes to keep an inmate off death row and send him to prison for life. In the Parkland case, jurors said they were split 9-3 in favor of death. Confessed killer Nikolas Cruz was sentenced to life in prison in early November for murdering 17 people, and wounding another 17. “I don’t think justice was served in that case,” DeSantis said Thursday. “If you’re going to have capital [punishment], you have to administer it to the worst of the worst crimes.”

The state will consider making it a first-degree felony to possess, sell or manufacture fentanyl to look like candy. The governor said he is proposing a mandatory life sentence and $1 million penalty for those targeting children. The problem doesn’t just impact families, but the most unlikely of police, too. Two drug-sniffing K-9 dogs with the Wilton Manors Police Department nearly died in 2016 from an overdose while conducting a search warrant. Both received emergency Narcan treatments, a department member said Thursday. His office is also allocating $20 million for law enforcement agencies to increase efforts to stop the illicit sale and trafficking of fentanyl.

DeSantis said the state currently “doesn’t allow capital punishment for anything short of a homicide.” But sex predators “are ruining these kids’ lives” and are “unrepentant.” He said the state is “exploring ways” to “facilitate some capital trials if you have the worst of the worst.”

“I believe the only appropriate punishment that would be commensurate to that would be capital,” he said of sex predators. “Everyone feels that way when you see this,” he said. At the least, he said he wants to see predators get life in prison, because “they will reoffend if you put them back on the street,” he said.

When asked at the news conference if he was satisfied there was enough done at the state level to prevent another school massacre, DeSantis referenced how he had removed Broward’s sheriff once he was sworn into office in 2019, there was money spent on school security, there has since been a statewide grand jury and there have been ”changes” at the School Board, a reference to the suspension of four members.

“Before I became governor, nobody had been held accountable for any failings. Now people have been held accountable,” he said.

“I think just having accountability is going to make it less likely that somebody like this guy [Cruz] gets passed around the system and everybody turns a blind eye knowing that this guy was a problem,” he said.

“It’s just wrong,” he repeated of Cruz’s life sentence.

As DeSantis focused on the tough-on-crime laws, some people drew attention to the governor’s support for permitless carry gun legislation, which would allow people to carry handguns without training or a permit. Opponents of the measure say that would lead to more gun violence.

“If you intend to be tough on crime & safety, stop pushing the notion of permitless carry which will guarantee more gun violence in Fl,” tweeted Fred Guttenberg, whose daughter was killed in the Parkland school shooting.

The measure’s supporters, who call it “constitutional carry,” say state requirements make it harder for people to protect themselves.

#florida #desantis #‘A law and order state’: DeSantis details push for tough-on-crime laws in Florida #white supremacy

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vague-humanoid · 2 years

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“We’re not playing chess,” she said. “This is the most uncalled for, unprofessional way to try a case. You all knew about this. Even if you didn’t make your decision until this morning. To have 22 people plus all of the staff and every attorney march into court and be waiting as if it’s some kind of game ... I have never experienced a level of unprofessionalism in my career. It’s unbelievable."

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theusarticles · 2 years

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Jurors begin deliberations over death penalty for Parkland shooter | CNN

CNN — A 12-person jury in the sentencing trial of the Parkland, Florida, school shooter has begun deliberating over whether to recommend he be sentenced to death or life in prison. The jury, which received its instructions from Broward Circuit Judge Elizabeth Scherer in court Wednesday morning, about six months after jury selection first began, will be sequestered during deliberations. For…

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dontmeantobepoliticalbut · 1 year

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While addressing a gathering of law enforcement officers on Monday, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, said he hopes to change state law to make it easier to execute convicted criminals.

Calling it "one of the things we have to address," DeSantis said that a "supermajority" of jurors ought to be sufficient to sentence someone to death.

"If just one juror vetoes it, then you end up not getting the sentence," DeSantis said during remarks delivered at the Florida Sheriffs Association Conference. "Maybe eight out of 12 have to agree, or something, but we can't be in a situation where one person can just derail this."

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DeSantis was expressing his frustration with the decision of a jury in November to sentence Nikolas Cruz, who killed 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in 2018, to life in prison rather than handing down the death penalty. Despite the governor's description of the jury, FloridaPolitics.com notes that there were three jurors, not just one, who refused to impose the death penalty.

Prior to 2016, Florida allowed juries to impose the death penalty with as little as a 7-to-5 majority. That changed after the state Supreme Court ruled in 2016 that "the jury's recommended sentence of death must be unanimous" in order to comport with the Eighth Amendment's prohibition on cruel and unusual punishments. In a separate case decided at the same time, the state's high court invalidated a newly passed law that would have allowed the death penalty if 10 of the 12 jurors recommended it.

A year later, the state legislature and then–Gov. Rick Scott, a Republican, approved a new law requiring unanimous juries in death penalty decisions.

While DeSantis' remarks on Monday were somewhat vague, it would appear the Governor is preparing to revisit the territory staked out by that overturned 2016 law that would have allowed supermajority juries to recommend the death penalty.

He may face a more welcoming legal environment now, as the Florida Supreme Court in 2020 overturned its own ruling in that 2016 death penalty case. So while the state law requiring unanimous juries in death penalty decisions remains in force, the state's high court has signaled that convicts can once again be sentenced to death by non-unanimous juries.

Returning to a situation in which non-unanimous juries can impose the death penalty would make Florida a serious outlier in terms of capital punishment policy. Of the 30 states where the death penalty remains on the books, only Alabama allows a judge to impose the sentence with less than a majority of the jury agreeing—there, at least 10 jurors must vote for the death penalty, a higher threshold than what DeSantis suggested he'd like to see in Florida. The state would also be an outlier when compared with the standard required for federal death penalty cases, which must have a unanimous recommendation from the jury.

There's no doubt that the outcome of the Parkland shooter's trial elicited strong emotional responses from those closely affected by it. "There are certain crimes where any punishment other than [the death penalty] just doesn't fit the crime," DeSantis said Monday. "So I was very disappointed to see that."

But strong emotions are not the best guides for policy making—and that's especially true in situations where the stakes are quite literally life and death. As Reason's CJ Ciaramella noted in 2020, Florida has had more exonerations of death row inmates than any other state in the country: roughly one for every three executions carried out. That ought to inspire more humility, not aggressiveness, in deciding when the state should be allowed to kill.

Perhaps DeSantis has a more rational argument for changing Florida's death penalty laws to make it easier for the state to kill convicted criminals, but the case he outlined on Monday seems more based on vengeance than on justice.

#us politics #news #reason #2023 #Florida #gov. ron desantis #capital punishment #death sentence #Florida Sheriffs Association Conference #YouTube #videos #Forbes #FloridaPolitics.com #8th amendment #florida supreme court #conservatives #republicans #gop #death penalty

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philsmeatylegss · 2 years

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Nikolas Cruz is having a trial? FOR WHAT???? Have you seen JCS video?? My boy isn’t insane and a youtuber proved that. Nevertheless a court of law. Ig knowing American justice system that doesn’t say much but still. I love true crime and I’ll probably watch a lot of the trial but so fucking annoying time is taken away from people who deserve a trial for this sack of shit

#rae’s rambles #tw school shooting

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thejewishlink · 2 years

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Parkland Shooter’s Use Of Swastikas Is Focus Of Court Fight

Prosecutors and attorneys for Florida school shooter Nikolas Cruz battled Wednesday over whether jurors at his upcoming penalty trial should learn about the swastikas carved on his gun’s magazine, his racist, homophobic and threatening online posts, his computer searches for child pornography and his cruelty to animals. Prosecutors argued that the swastikas, racism, postings, computer searches…

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#Florida #Florida school shooter Nikolas Cruz #Parkland #SWASTIKAS

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