The hardest case for mercy: inside the effort to spare the Parkland school shooter [the death penalty]

I didn't follow this case that closely so for me much of this background is new information. It's quite surprising in a way. What comes to mind is a question of what anyone could have done if they had known this about him at any point, is there something that they could have done and if not, what are people supposed to do about that?

Brenda, in a series of conversations with O’Shea, had no problem describing the dark days of 1998. She sold sex, yes; she smoked crack

Finally, the story of Brenda’s drinking came out. Malt liquor, fortified wine — she said she’d been drunk virtually every day of the first eight months of the pregnancy.

O’Shea had begun to sort through Cruz’s vast documentary record — school reports, psychological testing, run-ins with the law. He’d been identified as odd or ill or both from the time he was a toddler: socially isolated, intellectually challenged, obsessed with guns and violent video games, explosively aggressive, desperate for friends and their approval.

One expert hired by the defense emerged from an evaluation of Cruz confused and shaken, asking the defense team, “What the fuck was that?” He was at a loss for a diagnosis for the profoundly damaged human being he’d just seen, but he said it was not autism.

They would achieve surprising breakthroughs in their inquiry into the life and mind of Nikolas Cruz, tracking down a former principal who had never appeared on anyone’s witness list, and who would defy what he felt was intimidation from the prosecution to testify that Cruz was so troubled he never should have been admitted as a student at Marjory Stoneman Douglas.

Everywhere the kid went seemingly there were people who recognized he was troubled and there was seemingly nothing anyone can do to help. His adoptive parents paid ~$20,000 to adopt him and seemingly had money to spend at that point anyhow, so presumably they weren't lacking for resources (though of course circumstances can change and a kid that needs substantial help can cost a lot more than $20,000 I'm sure).

I'm someone who tends to take more of what I view as a fatalistic viewpoint on some aspects of life, I don't see everything as a situation that can be fixed or that there's always something that could be done to avoid a negative outcome, I just don't think that in many cases whether it's resources necessary or other factors just aren't available. I can acknowledge in some cases if you have enough resources for any given problem you can probably address it, but even rich people die early sometimes.

I'm not saying that is the situation in the case, I actually just don't know, it seems quite hopeless but I do wonder if there are actually things that could have been done if only people knew? Is there a point where someone borders on being a functional human being but is severely dysfunctional in other significant ways is too far gone to do anything about? And if so, what do you do then, except wait for their dysfunction to manifest into a horrible crime that justifies locking them away?

I do say that even after reading about a small part of the story they tell of one of the women that had sort of recovered (Carolyn) from living a life that someone might question if you can come back from, which of course there are plenty of stories out there of people who managed to emerge from some pretty dark depths and make something better for themselves and people around them, so I know it's possible in some cases.

Those thoughts aren't even aimed at what a lot of the other information described here talks about which is what the titles gets at, the death penalty or life sentences without parole, which I think is a substantially different subject from my above ponderings.

“That kid was not born with a typical brain,” said one of the three jurors. “How can we execute someone like that?”

“I haven’t met somebody that is just a murderer for the sake of being a murderer,” O’Shea said. “I don’t know that that person even exists.”

I think I've mentioned it here before, I don't see death as a negative necessarily but I don't really care for the death penalty because it's just not an efficient or particularly useful/helpful method of making society better. The emotional aspect to it doesn't really factor in for me because of my own personal views on death but also because I don't think emotional arguments are even useful against the death penalty since people who are receptive to them are likely already against the death penalty.

Justice requires that a defendant, whatever the nature and scope of their crimes, gets what they deserve. Mercy is something different, O’Shea believes. It is an act of grace, separate from the notion of justice.

“Mercy is a gift that is defined by the giver and has little to do with the worthiness of the recipient,” she said. “Bestowing mercy does not mean that a person should be free from consequences.”

To grant mercy, she said, requires a certain letting go of vengeance and retribution, however understandably felt. Doing so can be liberating to those who give it.

“Anger is a burden on the soul,” she said.

This is something that I do believe but perhaps don't always practice, but I do sometimes try to remind myself of it in those moments of frustration. It'd be nice if as a society we were able to work more towards embracing this type of mindset, though I realize it is not something you can force upon people. Everyone has to come to it on their own terms in order for it to work. Its another reason why I don't approach the death penalty with emotional elements involved because I don't think you can make someone who is angry let go of that anger, and while you may not be able to reason with them either, you ideally can reason with other people who aren't as personally affected but are influential in the outcomes.

The article is much longer than what I've gotten through so far but my comment is already pretty long so I'll leave it here for now as I continue to read more.

Vesey said he had been able to get Cruz placed in an appropriate school, Cross Creek, for the second half of his eighth-grade year. Cruz had done better there. But then, at his adoptive mother’s encouragement, Cruz was permitted to enroll at Marjory Stoneman Douglas. Cruz had called Cross Creek “the retard school.” His mother hated the stigma she felt with him there. Stoneman Douglas was a big, high-achieving high school, full of accomplished and ambitious children from the county’s better-off families.

Over the years, Cruz would never be diagnosed with a fetal alcohol disorder. Not when, as a young schoolboy, he opted to spend his time in class inside a large cardboard box, so acute was his social anxiety. Not when he became obsessed with violent video games and rampaged through the house when he lost at them. Not when the police were repeatedly called to the Cruz home because he’d killed a neighbor’s chickens or assaulted his own mother. And not when he began to collect high-powered guns, talking to them and sleeping with them at night.

Only when he’d killed 17 people at a high school he never should have attended would Cruz be seen by experts in FASD. Two such experts, including Jones, tested and evaluated Cruz, drawing on school and medical records dating back to his birth. Upon being delivered, it turned out, Cruz had to be resuscitated. As early as age 3, he was found to have “overall impairment in adaptive functioning abilities.” A psychological exam done when he was 5 years old showed problems with memory, language, reasoning and impulsivity.

Tests done at the request of the defense team showed Cruz had an IQ of 83, below average even for FASD children. He had deficits in nine of 11 domains of the brain, including suggestibility and executive functioning. The diagnosis, according to Jones, was definitive: alcohol-related neurodevelopmental disorder. In fact, Jones said, in reviewing the birth records and the accounts of Brenda, Carolyn and Danielle, he’d never seen such a convincingly documented case of an expectant mother’s drinking.

Cruz spoke of hearing voices in his head, of a lost girlfriend, of being embarrassed about having been suspended from the Parkland high school for fighting. He said he’d previously considered shooting people at a public park, and described trying to kill himself in recent weeks by overdosing on ibuprofen. When asked why he wanted to end his life, he answered, “Loneliness.”

Cruz’s end of a conversation, the team would discover, was a hit-and-miss exercise in saying what he thought others wanted to hear. He rarely guessed right.

Lynda (Cruz's adoptive mother) lived in something of a fantasy world with her adopted children, and her capacity for denial of reality hindered her ability to get them the specialized treatment they needed. For years, she presented herself to the world as the biological mother of Nikolas and his brother Zachary, their status as adopted children a source of embarrassment to her.

“Lynda wanted so badly to have a normal kid,”

When the cops came to the house after yet another explosive episode with her son — a psychologist who would visit the home described it as “a war zone” — Lynda would decline to have him arrested.

... in 2017, when officials at Stoneman Douglas wanted Cruz sent back to Cross Creek, the specialized school where he’d had some success, Lynda fought the idea. Frustrated, school officials told her if Cruz were to stay, he would be stripped of the support services the school had been providing. They had tried their best, they told her; they wanted him somewhere else. Lynda insisted on Cruz remaining at the school, and in short order, his behavior in school went further off the rails.

Then, just three months before the shooting in Parkland, Lynda was gone as well. She’d come down with pneumonia, stopped eating and resisted treatment. Those close to her felt she had chosen to die, betrayed by her late husband’s mismanagement of finances and overwhelmed by her children. Cruz and his brother told the defense team that no member of Roger’s or Lynda’s families, including a godparent to Cruz, contacted them after they’d lost both their parents, ignoring their pleas for help or acknowledgement.

In the courtroom that day, as the verdict for life was read out, the defense team was uncertain Cruz understood what had happened. He eventually managed to say, “Good,” and “Thank you.” He mostly wanted to know if people might still visit him in prison.

“Nik is just always trying to figure out what he’s supposed to say in any given situation,” Kate O’Shea said.

Emphasis added.

That anyone, anyone, for any reason, feels they must lash out violently, that they must employ physical means to force others in any way, is a terrible, horrific thing. Especially when they do so in lethal ways, physically crippling ways.

It's one thing to, say, shove someone in a fit of anger, but that person receives only bruises. To have a momentary burst of anger that even a good, wholesome, civilized person can sometimes fall into depending on circumstances.

It's quite another to attack others (by any means, in any fashion, whether unarmed, or with physical skills, or with weapons of any type). Especially in a way that results in death or crippling injury. Such things cannot be apologized for, retracted, or moved on from. Death is permanent. Nerve or other damage that removes bodily function is (usually) permanent.

However, as is often the case when a public outburst of such horrific violence occurs, when you dig, when you actually look at what's going on with the suspect/assailant, they are often someone who feels rejected, abandoned, discriminated against, without hope, and permanently shunned.

Not everyone can handle such treatment. Not everyone is capable of turning inward and finding some sort of peace and ongoing life contentment that doesn't involve the validation of or pleasant interaction with others. Some people, when they're continually rejected, are unable to cope. Are unable to find a way to live their lives without other people who don't insult, bully, ridicule, or reject them.

The constant isolation adds up. Weighs on them, brings what mental fortitude they might have tumbling down since there's never a break, never a chance to rebuild and reinforce the notion that sometimes people can be pleasant and kind to you.

This is a tragedy. It's a terrible thing. Nothing about it is pleasant or nice or easy to understand. Not when they suffer in isolation, and definitely not when it drives them to lash out and bring their pain to bear on others.

It's a tragedy on both sides of this equation. Bullying, in any form. And childhood, school yard, bullying is no less destructive than adult bullying. It's not "cute" when kids bully each other. It's not "they're just kids" when they single out other kids for bullying. When the in group selects targets and hounds kids. That is crippling. When every day, year after year, those bullied children have no outlet, no chance to socially interact without pain and rejection designed to isolate and damage them, it's not at all cute or acceptable.

Nor is it any better when adults do similar things, but in a more sophisticated but purposefully cruel manner. It's just adults have adult bodies, with adult strength, usually adult wits and adult experience. So the bullying adults wage upon their targets is often more elaborate, better designed to sink into the target and flense away at their sense of self, their sense of identify, their ability to find a place within themselves where there's no pain and no fear.

That people reject other people, that some folks are targeted by everyone else in their life for rejection, for ridicule, for isolation, is a core cause of societal violence that isn't sexy and thus doesn't get coverage in either media or societal conversation about such incidents.

The folks who struggle to ever join a conversation, to be able to tell a joke or story that brings a smile rather than a wince and a 'get away', who can never pick up the phone and call someone to come over and hang, to be with them like a pal, who are always, always, always alone ... no that never gets any coverage. Never gets any attempt to understand how damaging and terrifying it is, to be a black hole stuck in a world full of light that avoids you.

Society would rather react in shock, decry it, and then ignore it in a rush to punish. Politicians emulate this behavior. There's no benefit to a politician, to any leader at any level, to stand up in front of her or his constituents and begin to talk about deep, complicated reasons for why a horrific thing happened.

Mobs have no patience. Mob rules exist for a reason. The mob wants blood. The mob wants to hear about action right now. Again, all throughout this article, you see that. People who had absolutely no interest, however briefly, in contemplating that there might be some other cause for what led to Cruz doing what he did other than "that fucker is evil."

Which simply kicks the can, ignores the sound it makes tumbling down the road, and soon enough some other rejected, lonely person decides enough's enough and lashes out. Where the cycle begins again. And again. And again.

People don't need guns, or any weapon, to lash out. All that does is change the math of the situation. Further, banning weapons (of any type) is just another can to kick. It, again, ignores the problem.

It is a very tough ask, to try to craft a societal expectation that people should try to be just a little kinder to one another. To exercise even a small amount of patience. When it's so easy, so easy in fact that it's the norm in most societies, to simply lash out, push away, shun, reject, and otherwise ridicule and demean anyone another person decides is weird. Or different. Or strange. Unusual. Creepy. Off putting. Disturbing.

I could continue trotting out the thesaurus, but the core issue here is people feel it's completely okay to verbally and socially lash out at others. That person asked or said something to you in a way you decided must mean they're X or Y or Z (where those things are bad in your eyes), and you don't exercise any amount of patience or perhaps seek to clarify if they intended to be hurtful or weird or whatever it emotional conclusion you're jumping to. No, jump to that conclusion. They must have done it, meant it, harmfully. The opening salvo is to shun them, push them aside, make it clear to them they're unwanted and that you're rejecting them.

And you go about your day. You leave that rejection in your wake.

Now multiply that by an entire society.

Most people who are social, who do have social access to their fellows, are usually extremely dismissive of the concept of being rejected. They can't see, can't fathom, how it could possibly hurt so much, could be so devastating. Just how much damage it does to someone trapped in that dead zone where they have no one, can reach out nowhere, where they're always alone.

And why would those moving on understand any of that? When they talk to people, they're accepted. At least, most of the time. They get along. People, at least some people, will treat with them kindly, in a friendly manner, will engage in social discourse with them. Sure not everyone, but they've got other friends. They can fill their human need for interaction in lots of ways, and laugh off those they've encountered whom they don't get positive, beneficial interaction from.

These so-called 'normal' people often never seem to understand that rejection isn't something you walk off, you brush aside, you suck it up and move on from, when it happens, all, the, time. Everywhere, everyone. You always are shunned. Always rejected. You're always the weirdo, the stranger, the disturbed monster.

Few people ever contemplate that sort of life. It's an alien concept to them. So they just default back to their assumptions. This person isn't broken, or pitiable. They're just evil. Yeah, that's it. We don't like them, they make us feel uncomfortable, so we'll label them evil and be done with it. Cool, let's go hang out, put this weirdo person out of our minds.

Cruz, anyone, who lashes out has done a horrific thing. But just because someone doesn't lash out with physical violence doesn't change that they were lashing out. That such acts don't cause damage, don't destroy lives. Lashing out with cruelty, with social shunning and isolation, is very damaging and quite crippling. It leads to physical lashing out that makes the news.

Cruz is someone who needed help. He was failed by everyone in his life. Both his mothers, the school system, the police, the social network, classmates, people in his neighborhood, everyone. It led him to lash out, and it's a horrific crime that it happened.

But it's going to keep happening until society understands that purposefully and happily driving people into the depths of despair, where they have no social contacts and thus no sense that there's any hope for a change in their bleak social circumstances, is what will often lead to the physical violence.

There are no easy answers to this problem. All the answers are tough ones. Complicated and nuanced. But humans are social creatures. Humans who feel they can't function without some level of social interaction eventually begin to crack. Sometimes those cracks lead to violent lashing out.

The sooner the whole of the us who are often horrified by such a crack becoming violently public can try to take steps to maybe lessen how rejected and alone some of society's most vulnerable members feel, the sooner we can be maybe a few steps closer to that wonderful world so many of us hope to one day live in. A world where everyone's at peace, and we all get along.

All get along. Not just the cool kids, not just the boss's favorite, not just the life of the party. All. Everyone. Even the weirdos deserve to have some kindness in their lives. At least sometimes. To give them a little bit of light. Something to look forward to as they sit alone in the darkness.

I'm sympathetic to the story of FASD described here, but ultimately I'm opposed to the death penalty wholesale, so it doesn't do much for me as far as the decision goes. As someone who unilaterally opposes the death penalty, I hope this defense prevails.

Having to live with what he did for the rest of his life, and in prison, might be worse in some ways than the death penalty. Spinning it that way may get his life saved.

Almost everyone whose done something bad or wrong has all kinds of factors contributing to it. But as a society we generally agree with the concept of free will. What he did is so cut and dry it's clear he needs to be removed from society. Whether that's the death penalty or life in prison we should just pick the cheapest option. which should be the death penalty but often isn't.

An extremely well written and researched piece. The amount of detail was fascinating.

But there was a history inside the “empty box” of Cruz, a life not only shaped by damage done before his birth, but that of a boy in search of everyday desires — to be accepted, to be seen as confident and attractive and tough, to amount to more than an accumulation of problems and disappointments.

Nik Cruz, like every other human on earth, was in a lifelong quest to be accepted and he never was. Not even after both his adoptive parents and his birth mother died:

Cruz and his brother told the defense team that no member of Roger’s or Lynda’s families, including a godparent to Cruz, contacted them after they’d lost both their parents, ignoring their pleas for help or acknowledgement.

His adoptive mother was overwhelmed and delusional about her son at times, having a desperate desire to have a 'normal' child but it seems like someone at the ROTC program should have done some due diligence and recognized that a violent kid with ideations of school shootings should never have been admitted to their program. One more failure in a long line of failures, where a government sponsored program to teach a child how to kill, produced a child killer.

When others tried to make sure Cruz did not join the Parkland school’s Junior ROTC program, Lynda persisted, and Cruz would even be allowed onto the program’s marksmanship team. It’s where he learned to shoot a gun.

Its hard to feel sorry for a mass school shooter, but Cruz had more than his fair share of evil inflicted upon him too:

In the 911 call, Cruz said he’d been assaulted by one of the neighbor’s sons, a boy he’d later say had repeatedly sexually assaulted him in childhood. He called from a playground nearby. He was hurt and alone, he told the dispatcher “The thing is, I lost my mother a couple days ago, so, like, I’m dealing with a bunch of things right now,” he said in the call.

Probably most fascinating was learning that although they were his defense team, the lawyers were not immune to the pain that Cruz caused. One member of the team, Maney the ex-cop fantasized about killing him in prison:

It was hard for Maney, who in his career had trained police forces from Bogota to Tokyo, not to feel vengeful when he met Cruz in the jail. Alone with a mass murderer, he entertained thoughts of killing him inside the jail and being done with it.

And lead lawyer Secor, in spending three days with the father of 18 yr old victim Meadow Pollack, voiced his feelings about how would have killed Cruz if he knew what was about to happen:

“I said, ‘If I had been in Parkland that day and I had a crystal ball and I knew it was going to happen, I’d have taken my Remington deer rifle to the roof of the 1200 Building, and when Nik stepped out of the Uber, I'd have blown his fucking brains out right there, and it wouldn't have bothered me at all.’”

The lawyers did their job. Doesnt sound like any of it was enjoyable or without deep stress, but they did what lawyers are required to do.