Jurors began deliberating on Wednesday on sentencing the perpetrator of a 2018 Florida high school shooting, after a long and harrowing trial in which the prosecutor sought the death penalty .
Now 24, Nikolas Cruz has admitted and pleaded guilty to shooting dead, armed with a semi-automatic rifle, 14 high school students and three employees, and injuring 17 others in less than ten minutes at Marjory High School. Stoneman Douglas of Parkland, north of Miami, from which he had been expelled a year earlier.
AFP
The 12 members of the jury – seven men and five women – withdrew to deliberate Wednesday morning in a Fort Lauderdale court. The law requires them to be unanimous in inflicting capital punishment.
During three months of heartbreaking hearings, the team of prosecutor Michael Satz plunged them back into the horror of February 14, 2018, insisting on the premeditated nature of the bloodbath, with supporting images.
AFP
Melisa McNeill, the lawyer for Nikolas Cruz, asked the jury to show compassion for her client, arguing that he was born with fetal alcohol syndrome, to an alcoholic homeless mother and drug addict, and that he had subsequently grown up in an abusive home with a depressed adoptive mother who was also an alcoholic.
The Parkland attack had deeply shocked American public opinion and sparked a national anti-gun protest movement of historic proportions, led by young people, without this being translated into strong measures at the federal legislative level, in particular due to the influence of the gun lobby in Congress.
On March 24, 2018, marches organized at the call of young survivors and parents of victims brought together 1.5 million people to demand stricter regulation of firearms in the United States.
But the country continues to be the scene of bloody shootings. Nineteen children and two teachers were still killed in May in an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas.