Is a death verdict in Parkland trial worth the trauma?

Ghastly videos of a murderous rampage; testimony from traumatized survivors; a wounded survivor displaying his jagged scars; recorded moans of dying students; gruesome autopsy photos; parents attesting to their grief and anger.

Then on Thursday, the 12th and final day of the prosecution’s case for the death penalty, jurors toured an abandoned building on the campus of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, sealed and preserved for the last 53 months with bloodstained floors left unwashed and bullet-pocked walls left unrepaired.

We’ve known the basic facts for four years: that on St. Valentine’s Day 2018 a pitiless social misfit with Columbine ambitions murdered 17 and wounded 17 others.

But the sentencing trial of Nikolas Cruz (who pleaded guilty in October) loosed an onslaught of excruciating details, day after brutal day, like a recurring nightmare. With testimony so affecting that, in one instance, Cruz’s own lawyers couldn’t stifle their tears.

“Shut it off!” the mother of a murdered student shouted from the gallery, as audio of gunfire reverberated through the courtroom.

Too much, too graphic, too horrible. “Shut it off.”’

But prosecutor Mike Satz’s strategy had been to overwhelm jurors with so much damning evidence they’re bound to return 17 separate death sentences, though one might do. Satz was intent on proving the obvious: cruel, cold, calculated, premeditated, heinous criminality — lest the coming defense testimony about Cruz’s mental afflictions move jurors toward leniency. As if condemning a 23-year-old to life in one of Florida’s hellhole prisons qualifies as leniency.

When the trial resumes Aug. 22, defense experts will describe a child’s mind damaged in utero by his criminally inclined, alcohol- and crack-addicted mother and about his history of self-harm, depression and autism.

But no amount of expert testimony will undo the jurors’ impressions of the YouTube ravings Cruz posted in the months prior to the shooting: “I wanna kill people,” “I’m going to be a professional school shooter,” “I have no problem shooting a girl in the chest,” “It makes me happy to see people die.”

And it won’t undo the rapid-fire carnage he carefully planned and executed, firing 139 shots in just six minutes.

There’s hardly a chance the jurors won’t send Cruz to death row. During his 44 years at Broward state attorney, Satz’s office has hung murder convictions and death sentences on defendants with far-less-incriminating evidence (including more wrongful convictions than any other jurisdiction in Florida.)

But can a death verdict provide solace enough to justify putting this community through this torturous trial?

Was it worth postponing the demolition of Building 1200, a looming reminder to Douglas students and faculty that, four years later, their campus remains a crime scene? For a 92-minute jury walk-through?

The prospect of lethal injection hasn’t proved much of a deterrent among this subset of killers. Most of America’s major mass murders have taken place in death-penalty states. And most of the murderers chose to either kill themselves or effect suicide by a shootout with police.

The Associated Press reported that other than Cruz, nine of the American mass shooters who murdered 17 or more people were either killed or they killed themselves. The only other living exception is the 2019 Walmart shooter in El Paso, who awaits trial for murdering 23 random shoppers.

That has made the Cruz penalty trial a national media sensation, fed by a dozen days of brutal evidence and testimony. And it has generated the kind of publicity craved by America’s cult of mass killers, for whom infamy was the motive. Cruz’s online history revealed a familiar eagerness to emulate, or maybe outdo, his murderous predecessors.

The 18-year-old gunman in the May 24 massacre in Uvalde, Texas, had similarly obsessed over prior mass shootings.

A year before Salvadore Ramos gunned down 19 students and two teachers at Robb Elementary School, acquaintances had nicknamed him “school shooter.” Texas investigators said the disaffected Ramos harbored a “desire for notoriety and fame.” Most of them do.

In 2015 researchers at Arizona State University reported that between 20% and 30% of mass shootings are set off by the national media coverage of previous rampages. Ramos reinforced those findings, collecting news stories about the shooting that left 10 dead in Buffalo, just five days before his own attack.

“Copycat” seems too cute a term for this pathology.

As The Atlantic warned last week, “The prosecution’s decision to illustrate Cruz’s slaughter moment by moment, using all available footage, will supply plenty more chum for the internet’s darkest waters.”

In a place awash with dangerous weaponry, it’s as if mass murder has become a contagious disease.