Jury Weighs Death Penalty for Parkland Gunman

No American mass shooter who has killed as many people as Mr. Cruz has faced trial. Most gunmen died during their attacks. A gunman accused of killing 23 people at a Walmart in El Paso in 2019 is awaiting trial.

The high-profile trial, which will be held inside a courtroom in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., is expected to be a lengthy and emotional proceeding that will last about four months. Jury selection alone took nearly three months.

Under Florida law, a death sentence would require a unanimous jury. If a single juror disagrees, the gunman would be sentenced to life.

Here are some major developments so far in the trial:

• The lead prosecutor, Michael J. Satz, is laying out the timeline of events on the day of the shooting in his opening statement, an effort to recreate the terror of that day for jurors and to preview the information they will see and hear during the trial. Several relatives of the victims broke down and one had to leave the courtroom.

• A juror denied that she had discussed the defendant or the death penalty, as someone asserted in an affidavit to the court.

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Despite his retirement, Mr. Satz stayed on to lead the prosecution of Nikolas Cruz. Mr. Satz’s successor, Harold F. Pryor, who is also a Democrat, opposes capital punishment but continued the pursuit of the death penalty in the case after hearing from victims’ families who supported it.

“This certainly is the type of case the death penalty was designed for,” Mr. Satz said in a statement a week after the Feb. 14, 2018, shooting. “This was a highly calculated and premeditated murder of 17 people and the attempted murder of everyone in that school.”

Mr. Satz is known to enjoy litigation. As state attorney, he personally tried all but a handful of homicides of police officers, including a 22-month trial that ended, in 2018, with three men convicted of murdering a sheriff’s deputy. All three men were sentenced to life in prison.

Mr. Satz also prosecuted several notorious workplace murders, including a shooting at a Waffle House restaurant in 2002 that resulted in a death sentence.

During Mr. Satz’s long tenure, the public defender’s office criticized him for failing to swiftly make reforms such as creating a conviction integrity unit to weed out false convictions. (Mr. Satz dismissed the public defender’s criticism as outdated and unfair.)

In announcing his retirement in 2020, Mr. Satz in part cited the Parkland case, saying he needed to prepare for the trial rather than campaign for re-election.

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Jury selection, which took nearly three months, was marred by confusion and controversies, including closely scrutinized decisions by Judge Scherer. At one point, defense lawyers tried to withdraw — and then asked the judge to remove herself, which she declined to do — after she insisted that the process continue even when a member of the defense team was out sick with Covid-19. Both the prosecution and the defense said the judge seriously erred in April when she dismissed a group of potential jurors without individually questioning them. Enough serious errors could lead to the reversal of a death sentence on appeal, forcing a retrial years from now.

Gov. Rick Scott, a Republican, appointed Judge Scherer, 46, to the bench in 2012. She had previously spent more than a decade as a prosecutor, working under Michael J. Satz, the former state attorney now leading the prosecution of Mr. Cruz. She has since been elected to the position twice.

Her father, William R. Scherer, co-founded the Conrad & Scherer law firm and was one of George W. Bush’s lawyers during the presidential election recount in 2000. Mr. Scherer was also a member of the circuit judicial nominating commission until his daughter decided to seek an appointment. Judge Scherer is a graduate of Florida State University and the University of Miami School of Law.

After her first marriage ended in divorce, she married a police detective, which became an issue in 2016 when she declined to recuse herself from a case investigated by his department. An appeals court removed her, and she no longer handles cases or warrants from the Hollywood Police Department.

Early in the Parkland case, public defenders sought Judge Scherer’s removal after she sent prosecutors a memo about the defenders’ attempts to visit Mr. Cruz in jail. Another judge had deemed the memo confidential.

Judge Scherer has also ruled for the prosecution in other important matters, including allowing a possible jury walk-through of the school building where the shooting took place and limiting how much public defenders can tell jurors about government agencies’ failures in dealing with Mr. Cruz.

In 2018, Judge Scherer made headlines when she berated reporters from The South Florida Sun Sentinel for publishing information about Mr. Cruz’s therapeutic history. The details were in public records that had been improperly redacted by Broward County Public Schools.

Judge Scherer threatened to restrict future news reports, an unconstitutional practice known as prior restraint, though she did not ultimately do so.

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In the end, after three rounds of questioning that were delayed in part when the lead defense attorney contracted Covid-19, the pool of prospective jurors was narrowed down to 53 people.

Lawyers for both sides made their final picks on June 29. Judge Elizabeth Scherer swore in the seven men and five women on the jury, as well as 10 alternates. If just one juror opposes a death sentence, then Mr. Cruz will receive a life sentence without the possibility of parole.

Two of the 12 jury members are I.T. workers. There is also a bank vice president, a probation officer, a Walmart stocking supervisor, a health insurance claims adjuster, a librarian, a human resources professional, a legal assistant, a U.S. Customs officer, an exporter and an investigator for a private firm.

A vast majority of the candidates were eliminated in the first phase of jury selection because their jobs or life circumstances would not allow them to commit to serving the four months the trial is expected to last. In the second phase, they were asked if they could handle the gruesome task of reviewing crime scene and autopsy photos and touring the building where the shooting took place, which has not been cleaned of blood stains and bullet holes.

If the defendant had been convicted at trial, the same jury that handed up the verdict would have been retained for a separate sentencing proceeding. But when a defendant pleads guilty before trial to a capital felony, as Mr. Cruz did, the court must impanel a jury just for sentencing, unless the defendant waives the right to have a jury make the determination.

What the state does

The prosecution’s job now is to convince the jury that there are aggravating factors in the case that would warrant the death penalty. Among the possible aggravating factors listed in the law are:

• That the killings were “especially heinous, atrocious or cruel”;

• That the defendant “knowingly created a great risk of death to many persons”;

• That the defendant killed “in a cold, calculated, and premeditated manner without any pretense of moral or legal justification.”

Prosecutors are expected to present extensive details of the 17 murders and 17 attempted murders at the high school, including hundreds of gruesome photographs and videos. The jury may also tour the school building where the shooting took place.

“They’re going to try to get these jurors to relive what happened to the victims,” said David S. Weinstein, a former prosecutor who is now a defense lawyer. “It’s going to be an emotional roller coaster.”

What the defense does

The defense will try to convince the jury that there are mitigating circumstances that would call for leniency. Under the law, those circumstances could include that the defendant “was under the influence of extreme mental or emotional disturbance” or had a diminished ability to understand whether his actions were criminal, among other factors.

The defense lawyers intend to show that Mr. Cruz, who was 19 at the time of the shooting, struggled with a difficult upbringing and mental health problems and had tried to get treatment. They have requested permission to show jurors a map of his brain, but the judge has yet to decide whether to allow it.

The jury’s task

After hearing the evidence, the jury must first decide whether the state has proved each of its claimed aggravating factors beyond a reasonable doubt. For the defendant to be eligible for the death penalty, the jury must unanimously find at least one of the aggravating factors to be proved.

Next, the jury would consider whether the proven aggravating circumstances are sufficient to warrant a death sentence and outweigh any mitigating factors found to exist, and if they do, whether to recommend a death sentence to the court. To do so, the jury must again be unanimous; otherwise the sentencing recommendation must be for life in prison without possibility of parole.

The court cannot impose a death sentence if the jury has recommended life in prison, but it can set aside a jury’s recommendation of death and impose a life sentence instead.

A strange case

The need for a special sentencing jury is one of several ways the Parkland case is extremely unusual. It is rare for someone as young as Mr. Cruz (he is now 23) to face the death penalty, and even rarer for someone who has committed so deadly a mass shooting to still be alive afterward to face justice.

“In a sense, we are in completely uncharted waters,” said Robert M. Jarvis, a law professor at Nova Southeastern University in Davie, Fla., who tracks mass killings. “You never get these kinds of trials, because the gunman is always dead.”

Patricia Mazzei contributed reporting.

Mr. Cruz’s parents, Lynda and Roger, adopted him when his biological mother gave him up after he was born. She played no role in his upbringing, but her extensive criminal and drug abuse history is expected to come up in the trial. The Cruzes also adopted Nikolas’s younger brother, Zachary; the brothers have the same biological mother. Zachary Cruz could be called to testify in court.

Records showed that Nikolas Cruz’s behavior worsened after difficult times in his life. He found his father dead at home of heart disease in 2004. He learned he was adopted when he was 15. His mother died of pneumonia in 2017, just a few months before the shooting.

He had struggled in school since kindergarten and exhibited aggression since middle school. His mother said he had been diagnosed with A.D.H.D., autism and obsessive compulsive disorder.

Once in high school, he repeatedly exhibited disturbing behavior. In 2016, he told another student that he had a gun at home and was thinking of using it, prompting two guidance counselors and a sheriff’s deputy to conclude that he should be forcibly committed for psychiatric evaluation. But he never was, despite making threats to himself and others.

He briefly attended an alternative school for students with emotional problems where he thrived. But he wanted to return to Stoneman Douglas. He did well there for some time, joining Junior R.O.T.C. and having a girlfriend. But he eventually worsened and declined to receive therapeutic care once he turned 18. By February 2017, failing grades forced him to withdraw. Three days later, he bought the semiautomatic rifle he would use in the shooting a year later.

The police were repeatedly called to his residences but never found enough reason to arrest him. The F.B.I. did not investigate tips about his interest in school shootings.

After his mother died, a friend of hers promised to take care of the Cruz brothers. The friend kicked Mr. Cruz out after less than a month, having called 911 on him three times, in large part because he wanted to keep guns. He was living with a schoolmate’s family at the time of the shooting.

Before the massacre, he recorded three videos on his cellphone that indicated that, like other young perpetrators of mass shootings, he wanted to be remembered.

Once inside, as he loaded his rifle, he happened across a student. “You better get out of here,” Mr. Cruz warned him. “Something bad is about to happen.” The student fled.

Then Mr. Cruz began to shoot. His rampage, which lasted just under six minutes, took the lives of 14 students and three faculty members in one of the deadliest school shootings in American history.

Killed in the shooting were Alyssa Alhadeff, 14; Scott Beigel, 35; Martin Duque, 14; Nicholas Dworet, 17; Aaron Feis, 37; Jaime Guttenberg, 14; Christopher Hixon, 49; Luke Hoyer, 15; Cara Loughran, 14; Gina Montalto, 14; Joaquin Oliver, 17; Alaina Petty, 14; Meadow Pollack, 18; Helena Ramsay, 17; Alex Schachter, 14; Carmen Schentrup, 16; and Peter Wang, 15.

Mr. Cruz killed the 17 victims and injured 17 others without entering a single classroom. Instead, he took aim at students and teachers trapped in the hallways or locked inside classrooms. Several times, he returned to people he had already wounded to shoot them dead.

Eleven victims were killed on the first floor, attacked so quickly that they had no time to seek cover. Six were killed on the third floor, where many were leaving their classrooms mistakenly thinking that a fire drill was underway after smoke from the gunfire set off the alarm. No one was killed on the second floor, where people had heard the initial gunshots and hid behind locked doors.

Mr. Cruz also tried to shoot from the teachers’ lounge into the throngs of students streaming outside after they heard the alarm. But his rounds did not pierce the hurricane-resistant windows. He left the school undetected. He was arrested about an hour later, walking down a residential street.

The shooting began a national gun control movement fueled by student activists. The Florida Legislature adopted some gun restrictions, which Rick Scott, the Republican governor at the time, signed into law.

Almost immediately, it became clear that there had been many missed opportunities for the authorities to intervene ahead of the shooting. The F.B.I. failed to investigate tips that warned Mr. Cruz might become a school shooter. School officials and a sheriff’s deputy had wanted to commit him for a psychiatric evaluation, but he never was.

And there were failures on the day of the shooting, too, a state investigative commission found, including that eight sheriff’s deputies ignored protocol for active shooters that called for pursuing the gunman to try to disarm him.