25
votes
The hardest case for mercy: inside the effort to spare the Parkland school shooter [the death penalty]
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- Title
- How Sparing the Parkland Shooter's Life Changed Florida's Death Penalty
- Authors
- Jovelle Tamayo, Elan Ullendorff, Aithne Feay, Ryan Murphy
- Published
- Sep 17 2024
- Word count
- 15 205 words
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?
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.
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.
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.
It's a really tragic story, and hindsight is 20/20, but...
Before he was born, his mother voluntarily documented that she was an alcoholic. From that point her drug and alcohol tests should have been witnessed in-person. At the very minimum then the adoptive parents would have known about the FAS risk.
After he was born if his parents had taken him to see a mental health professional, either from their own concern or if someone had said something to them, that professional probably would have picked up on an issue (purely based on how the article portrays him throughout life) and they could have gotten him ongoing care, a school for kids with different needs, idk, but not nothing.
Yeah I just finished reading it and concluding the rest of my thoughts in another comment, it still seems pretty hopeless largely because his adoptive mother did not want to acknowledge the real problems that Nik was likely dealing with.
I do think there is a case to be made that the "system" could have done more, though I'm not familiar with the inner workings of the systems which is where things really often break down and of course varies between states too making it more difficult to generalize across the US. In the US at least, as we're seeing with a few recent cases of school shooters where parents are now being charged, the responsibility for the child's well-being is very heavily reliant on the parent not being an obstacle to the system. If the parent chooses to fight against the system, it very often seems to be that it's much more legally difficult to actually do anything. I'm not saying it's impossible, but our systems and really much of our society is constructed around paths of least resistance, it's also just a principle of nature in many ways. A parent that substantially increases the resistance is not something that I'm going to expect our systems to routinely overcome.
The problem with this is that it encourages people to lie, at that point it was voluntary that she admitted that and more so she only had to start taking tests after she got arrested. She was under no obligation to take tests prior to that point, so even if they had required drug tests to be witnessed, much of the damage would have already been done presumably. That's not to say it would have been pointless to do, it still could have helped perhaps in the case of documenting for the child's future, I don't know if that type of record would carry over to the child and if it would be available to healthcare workers after the child was adopted. Maybe it would have made it harder for the adoptive mother to maintain denial about the situation, but it seems like there was decent enough evidence to think she should have known there was alcohol abuse while the biological mother was pregnant and she seemingly chose to never pursue this as it may have been her worst fears confirmed.
It turns out the article goes in more depth about what wasn't done and what maybe could have been done to change the course in Cruz's case, presuming of course the story the defense tells to be true which seems likely it is but could also be embellished or presented in a way that best saved their client from the death penalty. I'm not trying to copy everything from the article since obviously people can just read it all for themselves, but I'm focusing on the parts that I think tie together the most important bits to what I had previously stated.
So after reading all of that, much of it comes down to Lynda living in denial, and it's not hard to see why people and the system failed at every turn, because if the parent(s) aren't supporting the recommended courses of action, it's hard to get those things done. As the last bit I quoted stated it was the opinion of the retired cop who was on the defense team that he could have been held for a 72 hour assessment, and maybe that would have helped, or maybe he would have been released after 72 hours and gone back to the usual. Maybe at the least the guns would have been taken from him. But it's interesting that really tons of resources had seemingly been poured into trying to help him, and much of it was for nothing because Lynda just wouldn't face the reality of what damages he had suffered from fetal alcohol exposure.
I've read a little bit from other stories or backgrounds of people who have committed some horrible atrocities and it's not uncommon that they have many encounters with a system in which it seems at every turn people routinely just either can't do anything or don't have enough incentive to do something, meaning that there may be a lot more disincentives to taking action overriding any potential action they could take. It seems to be the case here as well.
Also one last bit that really hammers home just how significant the damage was, the defense had gotten Dr. Kenneth Jones to testify, who apparently had done some of the early work in discovering disorders caused by fetal exposure to alcohol.
In part of his testimony he said this
I'm in the strong opinion that we as a society need to democratize child rearing. I honestly think that most people are at bad parents at least a little bit, because child rearing is a holistic art and nobody is good at everything.
I don't necessarily mean that we should be taking children away from their parents and having them raised in a sci-fi style child-rearing environment, but the thing about having a parent be the final judge of how to raise a child is that when there are fewer people involved in the raising of them, they stop being powerful advisors and start to become authoritarian bosses who have surprisingly little consequences outside of major neglect or abuse. We tend to be very bad at being able to tell if a child is receiving psychological abuse, for instance. Heck, I don't think we as a society have a good grip on how to define what that means.
If we look at the history of child rearing in the US, we have gone from single income housing being the norm, where a parent (almost always the mother) would be a full-time parent for their children, often living in generational housing with a large family that included grandparents and cousins to act as additional guardians, caretakers, and teachers. Before the internet, they would also go out and deal with people outside the family much more frequently. They would do things like take their kids out to the park, where both children and parents would be able to socialize. We know that play is critical to the development of young kids.
I think back to my childhood in the early 90s, and the things I remember the most of my early years were the times I spent outdoors. Today, it feels like parents are terrified of letting their kids out to play. Today it seems increasingly rare to see them out in parks. I see them from time to time if I were to drive by the park with the elementary school next to it, but for the most part, the parks don't tend to have many children playing in them. When I do come across a child, they are most often watching videos on a tablet - something I have come to think of as anti-play because of the rise of programs like cocomelon that do not even have the redeeming value of containing educational content.
I fear that the children being raised today are part of another lost generation in part because of these trends, and I feel that because I think that even with the slightly better life I had when I was a kid I feel that I was failed in the same respects. I'm not a parent and I don't plan to ever be one, so I know people will not take me seriously, but I just want children to have the best possible future for them and I feel that we as a society have been failing our children for multiple generations.
I have some friends who lived in Norway for a few years (~15 years ago) and they described the school and social norms as much more uniform. I think that might be the kind of thing you're talking about, so it is possible in theory.
Assuming we are talking about the US, I think it's much more difficult because the US is a much more diverse place. I think you do see regional and local norms to some extent, though they are much less strongly held to than what my friends experienced in Norway.
The social structure you mentioned about one parent working and one parent rearing children full time reflects a very different economic reality than the one we live in today. I understand this change not as something people have rejected out of ideology, but out of necessity.
As for kids being outside less/getting less play time, (I've written about this elsewhere on tildes), the harsh reality is that, with a few exceptions, people can't just turn their kids loose to roam even when they agree that's a good thing for them. There's too many busybodies out there that harbor those fears, and too little certainly that CPS would side with parent's right to make those choices.
Regarding devices and TV, if you are a child of the 90s, then if you weren't raised on TV, you definitely in the minority. The fact that it's on tablets just means we have more control over how much they watch, what they watch, and when they can watch it. If you don't have kids and do not plan to, I would encourage you not to sit in judgement of a parent whose child is on a device. You don't have any context for that situation – how often it happens, what other constraints may have been put on the activity, how hard that parent's day has been, whether there is some other crisis going on in their life.
All parent make mistakes. Some are better than others. Some have a better start and better role models than others. Almost all the parents I know, even the ones whose parenting styles I disagree with, are just doing the best they can with the resources and information they have. I think looking at this kind of thing as a failure of parents individually ignores the important ways where the support systems for parents and families have been eroded in our society.
Of course. I didn't mean to say that individual parents are failing; I think the problems are with the way that our collective societies are structured, just like you're saying.
I can totally understand how you might think I meant it that way given how I opened that screed, but what I had meant to say is that we all have failures, and that is why it's critical that our society fills in the gaps. But as we are now, we're far too isolated for that to happen. We lack trust. We tell children to never talk to strangers. I'm personally terrified to talk to kids who don't have their parents or a guardian right next to me because I'm a nearly middle-aged ugly balding gay man and talking to kids could easily mean that someone will assume that I'm a pedophile. When I think about these things, I think to myself that these are not the conditions that are conducive to raising children who are well adapted to dealing with simple things like talking to people and are instead more likely to grow up with anxiety and/or depression.
I suppose another way to say what I'm thinking is that raising children is very labor-intensive and I don't think that children today are getting all of the labor required to ensure that they get all the tools they need to deal with society and the way that the world works. Anecdotally, one of the sentiments I have heard from many public school teachers is that they feel that they are being treated like babysitters for their students because they find themselves needing to teach them exceptionally basic things they should have learned at home. At the same time, here in the US schools have trended towards removing classes that teach important life skills like cooking, cleaning, accounting, and basic repair for clothing and furniture, and in more recent years there has been active pushback against teaching fundamental emotional and social skills.
My kid's second grade class had a shoe tying workshop. In an era where shoe laces are optional, this is exceptionally sad.
But god forbid we teach home economics and basic woodworking in middle school anymore.
The world is all topsy turvey and the kids are suffering for it.
Yeah, sorry if I came back hard at you. I think you hit a nerve, but that's a me problem. Sounds like we are in agreement.
It's so hard to find a community that you can trust if you don't have family local (or even if you do, sometimes) because everyone is pulled ten ways these days.
We've been doing Montessori for my daughter, and she'll likely be in it until she ages out in 6th grade. It's a great place that addresses many of the shortcomings you mentioned: lots of social/emotional emphasis, learning conflict resolution, self-guided work, learning practical life skills. It's a privilege to be able to afford it, but I can't speak highly enough for it. It really does feel like a place where the parents and teachers support each other, and we've made some very good friends among the parents. It's harder because it's not a neighborhood school, but we work with what we have.
I've known a surprisingly amount of people in FL that were "Baker Act'd", that is, put on an involuntary 72 hour psychiatric hold. Not a single one of them was helped in a meaningful way. I suspect it has a great deal to do with lack of funding. One girl I was very close with was desperate for help and from what I understand the bar to getting any support after the 72 hours was VERY high.
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.
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:
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.
Its hard to feel sorry for a mass school shooter, but Cruz had more than his fair share of evil inflicted upon him too:
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:
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:
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.