THIS IS NO CASE FOR THE DEATH PENALTY
TAKING A LIFE MAKES SENSE ONLY FOR THOSE WHO HAVE NO MORAL COMPASS WHATSOEVER
No one s hould be shocked by Florida prosecutors’ decision to seek the death penalty for Nikolas Cruz, the suspected gunman in the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting.
“I don’t think there’s any redemption for (Cruz) at this point,” a former Stoneman Douglas student told the Los Angeles Times. “How do you release someone like that back into society?”
The answer is that you don’t. And it’s easy to understand why a community t hat’s experienced such trauma and loss would consider execution of the perpetrator of the violence the most fitting end to a horrific story. But that doesn’t mean it’s the right choice.
For some time now, Cruz’s lawyers have been saying that their client would plead guilty if the state refrained from pursuing the death penalty. A guilty plea would spare all of us the media circus of a public trial; and it would spare surviving victims and victims’ families from having to testify, be cross-examined, and generally relive the pain of the murders, in open court.
It’s human to want to in- flict harm in return for injury done to innocent people — particularly innocent kids — and the execution of Cruz offers an opportunity to satisfy this thirst for vengeance. But whether the execution would serve any further purpose is doubtful.
The spectre of the death penalty is unlikely to deter future mass shooters because most mass shooters kill themselves after their spree of violence. The deterrent value of execution in the American criminal jus- tice system is further muted by the very lengthy amount of time ( averaging about 15 years) between a death sentence being issued and the death sentence being carried out, if it is carried out at all — close to a quarter of U.S. inmates awaiting execution die of natural causes before the state gets to them.
Now it’ s true that the thought of Cruz as a free man is disturbing, but it doesn’t take a death sentence to ensure that this never happens. In the United States, unlike in Canada, a sentence of life imprisonment without parole actually means just that — the sentenced criminal will spend the rest of his life behind bars.
No U.S. in mate sentenced to life without parole has ever been paroled.
(In theory, a governor can grant clemency to any prisoner, but this hasn’t happened in practice in a murder case since 1967 when, as governor of California, Ronald Reagan commuted a convicted murderer’s death sentence to life in prison after it was discovered that the murdered suffered from organic brain damage.)
And as horrific and deserving of punishment as Cruz’s actions are, they don’t paint a picture of a cold, scheming psychopath who has never — and probably will never — feel emotions deeply; someone like notorious serial killer Ted Bundy or grifter John Meehan, who was made famous by the Dear John podcast.
It’s certainly not my place to decide whether Nikolas Cruz could ever be worthy of redemption. In terms of whether the death penalty is called for, though, I think it’s relevant that Cruz has shown evidence of being a scared, troubled and upset kid, rather than displaying the superficiality, insincerity and overconfidence of a true psychopath.
These former emotional qualities come through par- ticularly strongly in a plaintive 911 call Cruz made shortly after his mother died, and a few weeks before the shooting, in which he openly expressed his distress about a fight he’d just had. He sounded sad and lost.
That’s no excuse for the terror and suffering Cruz inflicted. It’s just a sign that there is probably more hope of uncovering a feeling human being capable of compassion and connection in Cruz — even if it’s a slight hope — than there would be of uncovering such a person in a fearless, guiltless psychopath. And that hope may be enough to argue against taking Cruz’s life.
To the extent the death penalty makes sense ( and I’ ll admit that I’m becoming less and less convinced that it makes sense at all), it is for criminals who have repeatedly committed unspeakable violence with no moral compunctions.
Ironically, it is probably a true moral deficit with physiological origins that makes these criminal psychopaths the least worthy of sparing, when normally mental illness is an argument against culpability and, therefore, the death penalty.
At the very least, the death penalty makes little sense for a perpetrator such as Nikolas Cruz. He will be given no opportunity to re- offend, and, though there’s no guarantee, he just may be able to resurrect some specks of the sympathy and goodness that make human life worth preserving.
CRUZ HAS SHOWN EVIDENCE OF BEING A SCARED, TROUBLED AND UPSET KID.