As Court Postpones Start of Parkland Mass-Shooting Trial, a Victim’s Father Says Prosecutors Should Drop the Death Penalty

As the cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment tri­al of accused Parkland, Florida school shoot­er Nikolas Cruz was post­poned until at least the sum­mer of 2020, the father of one of the vic­tims of the attack has urged the pros­e­cu­tion to end the case now by drop­ping the death penalty. 

Michael Schulman’s son, Scott Beigel, was the track coach and a geog­ra­phy teacher at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School (pic­tured). He was one of 14 stu­dents and three teach­ers killed in the February 14, 2018 mass shoot­ing at the school. In an op-ed in the South Florida Sun Sentinel, Schulman wrote that he believes the shoot­er deserves the death penal­ty, but ​“put[ting] the stu­dents and fac­ul­ty through the trau­ma of reliv­ing that hor­ri­ble day is cru­el and unnecessary.” 

“‘Going for the death penal­ty,’” Schulman wrote, ​“will not bring our loved ones back to us. It will not make the phys­i­cal scars of those wound­ed go away. In fact, what it will do is to con­tin­ue the trau­ma and not allow the vic­tims to heal and get closure.”

Cruz has offered to plead guilty and be sen­tenced to 34 con­sec­u­tive life sen­tences with­out parole if pros­e­cu­tors waive the death penal­ty. State Attorney Michael Satz, who called the 19-year-old Cruz ​“evil” and ​“worse than Ted Bundy,” has reject­ed the offer. 

The court ini­tial­ly set a January 27, 2020 start date for the tri­al, less than two years after the February 14, 2018 shoot­ing. But in a court hear­ing on December 19, 2019, Broward County Circuit Judge Elizabeth Scherer agreed to a defense request to push back the tri­al date. The court did not set a new date, but Judge Scherer told the lawyers for the pros­e­cu­tion and the defense that the case ​“is going to be tried this sum­mer, at some point.”

Schulman’s November 29, 2019 op-ed not­ed that a tri­al would not inevitably result in Cruz’s exe­cu­tion, and that even after a tri­al, or as a result of court deci­sions on appeal, ​“the shoot­er could be sen­tenced to life with­out parole — the same sen­tence [he] has already agreed to accept in exchange for a guilty plea. Pursuing the death penal­ty,” Schulman wrote, ​“means sub­ject­ing our­selves to the trau­ma of a tri­al, reliv­ing the mur­der of our loved ones for a result we could have obtained with­out that trauma.”

“[L]et the shoot­er rot in jail for the rest of his life,” he wrote. ​“Let us try and get some clo­sure! Let us try and move for­ward with our lives.”

In seek­ing post­pone­ment of the start of tri­al, Cruz’s defense lawyers argued that the ini­tial tri­al sched­ule was hur­ried and invit­ed rever­sal on appeal if Cruz were con­vict­ed. The motion said that the pros­e­cu­tion had named 435 major wit­ness­es to appear in the case, includ­ing 84 cur­rent or for­mer Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School stu­dents, 17 of whom had been wound­ed in the attack. Noting that the aver­age time between arrest and tri­al in the 38 death-penal­ty case tried in Broward County since 1994 was more than four years, defense coun­sel said they could not prop­er­ly inves­ti­gate the case and present a defense at a tri­al set for less than two years after the shooting.

Cruz’s lead defense lawyer, Assistant Public Defender Melissa McNeil, described the sen­si­tiv­i­ty of the inter­view process. ​“Sometimes we have to stop because the wit­ness gets upset. We have post­poned or sus­pend­ed depo­si­tions in the mid­dle because a wit­ness can­not con­tin­ue. We were actu­al­ly told … by a student’s moth­er that if we depose her daugh­ter, her daugh­ter would kill herself.”