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Nikolas Cruz was the rare mass killer in America to have his fate decided at trial; many die during the shooting. It’s a bedrock principle of American justice that every defendant, no matter how serious the crime, is owed a robust defense.
For the first time, Cruz’s defense team told a reporter about how they dug into his troubled life and convinced a jury to spare him the death penalty.
Joe Sexton got access to Cruz’s medical, school, adoption and other records, interviewed members of the defense team at length, talked with Florida legislators, and met with experts on fetal alcohol poisoning and death penalty cases before the U.S. Supreme Court.
Here is what he learned: Key takeaways from the investigation into how Nikolas Cruz’s defense team convinced jurors not to impose the death penalty.
❶ A noble promise — and its cost.
Making the case for mercy in a death penalty case is a constitutional requirement. But for those who deliver on that mandate, making the case for a killer to be spared can be challenging. For the Cruz defense team, it was absolute hell. Kate O’Shea, the mitigation specialist who helped reconstruct Cruz’s life story, worked 5,000 hours on the case: interviewing 150 people, reading through 8,000 pages of school, medical and other records and spending 600 nights away from home. Casey Secor, a lawyer on the team, put in 4,200 hours, many of them spent looking at autopsy photographs and combing through the blood and brain matter preserved at the Parkland school for the jury to see. They and their colleagues encountered understandable hostility from parents and a shattered community, as well as public outrage.
❷ The team won — and then lost.
Against the odds, and in the teeth of anguished opposition from many of the victims’ families, Cruz was given a life sentence. But that outcome led Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and the state legislature to rewrite Florida’s death penalty statute to make it easier for defendants to be sentenced to die. Today, just eight votes are required for a jury to choose execution, the lowest bar of any state in the country.
❸ Drinking during pregnancy can permanently damage the developing baby’s brain, harm that often goes undiagnosed.
Cruz’s birth mother drank alcohol virtually every day of the first eight months of her pregnancy and signed hospital paperwork declaring herself an alcoholic. Yet Cruz was never evaluated for fetal alcohol spectrum disorder until he’d killed 17 people. He was determined by one of the country’s leading experts in fetal alcohol spectrum disorders to have been brain damaged by his birth mother’s drinking. Emerging research shows such children wind up over-represented in the country’s criminal justice, foster care and mental health systems.
❹ Family rage, family loss
At Cruz’s sentencing, several victim family members excoriated the defense team, even calling for their disbarment. However, the father of one of the girls killed by Cruz met with two members of the defense team at his home. They labored together on the father’s ranch, shared meals, and were given a challenge coin created in the teen daughter’s memory.
❺ Death penalty protections could be uncertain under this Supreme Court.
Some in the death penalty defense community worry that the current U.S. Supreme Court might roll back the long-established requirement that a defendant’s life story be considered by any jury considering execution.
For over 50 years, the Supreme Court has issued a series of decisions declaring who can or cannot be executed, and what evidence juries must hear before deciding a defendant’s fate in a death penalty case. All along, some conservative justices have argued the court has gone too far in what juries can hear about a defendant’s life circumstances. Now, with the court’s conservative supermajority and precedents involving abortion and affirmative action being overturned, some in the capital case defense community are concerned death penalty cases might be next.
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Joe Sexton is an American journalist reporting on this story for the Marshall Project. Previously, he was a senior editor at ProPublica, non-profit investigative news organization, and prior to that he worked for 25 years as a reporter and senior editor at The New York Times.
The Marshall Project is a nonprofit news organization covering the U.S. criminal justice system.
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