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| Photo Credit: AP. |
FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. (AP) — Prosecutors in the penalty trial of Florida school shooter Nikolas Cruz will begin their rebuttal case Tuesday, challenging his attorneys’ contention that he murdered 17 people because his birth mother abused alcohol during pregnancy, a condition they say went untreated.
Prosecutor
Mike Satz’s team is expected to call experts who will testify Cruz has
antisocial personality disorder — in lay terms, he’s a sociopath — and fully
responsible for his Feb. 14, 2018, attack at Parkland’s Marjory Stoneman
Douglas High School.
According to
the National Institutes of Health, people with antisocial personality disorder
commit “exploitive, delinquent and criminal behavior with no remorse.” They
usually have no regard for others, don’t follow the law, can’t sustain
consistent relationships or employment and use manipulation for personal gain,
the NIH says.
Prosecutors
will want to reemphasize Cruz “understood exactly” what he was doing during the
massacre and could “formulate and carry out a plan,” said David S. Weinstein, a
Miami defense attorney and former prosecutor.
Robert
Jarvis, a professor at Nova Southeastern University’s law school, said
prosecution experts will also likely testify that even if Cruz’s brain was
damaged by his birth mother’s drinking, that’s true of thousands of other
Americans and they don’t commit mass murder.
“If they did, we would be having mass murders
on an unprecedented scale,” he said.
Cruz, who
turned 24 on Saturday, pleaded guilty last October to murdering 14 Stoneman
Douglas students and three staff members. The seven-man, five-woman jury will
decide whether he is sentenced to death or life without parole, weighing
aggravating factors presented by prosecutors against the defense’s mitigating
circumstances. A juror could also vote for life out of mercy for Cruz. For the
former Stoneman Douglas student to receive a death sentence, the jury must
unanimously agree.
Satz’s team
told Circuit Judge Elizabeth Scherer their presentation could take two weeks,
but Jarvis and Weinstein question whether that’s too much for a jury that began
hearing evidence in July.
Jurors may
be eager to deliberate, so Satz should keep the rebuttal case focused and to
the point, they said.
“Don’t get greedy,” Weinstein said.
Jarvis said
lawyers too often think that if they just add more witnesses and evidence, that
makes their case stronger. But in a trial like Cruz’s where the decision isn’t
whether he’s guilty but what sentence he deserves, Jarvis believes that by
rebuttal each juror knows his or her vote. Any reconsideration won’t come until
deliberations.
“If you do a
long rebuttal, that makes jurors think, ‘Maybe the defense really did score
some points that I didn’t realize,’” Jarvis said.
Satz kept
his main case simple, focusing on Cruz’s eight months of planning, the seven
minutes he stalked the halls of a three-story classroom building, firing 140
shots with an AR-15-style semiautomatic rifle, and his escape.
He played
security videos of the shooting and showed gruesome crime scene and autopsy
photos.Teachers and students testified about watching others die. He took the
jury to the fenced-off building, which remains blood-stained and bullet-pocked.
Parents and spouses gave tearful and angry statements about their loss.
Cruz’s
attorneys never questioned the horror he inflicted, but focused on their belief
that his birth mother’s heavy drinking during pregnancy left him with fetal
alcohol spectrum disorder. Their experts said his bizarre, troubling and
sometimes violent behavior starting at age 2 was misdiagnosed as
attention-deficit/ hyperactivity disorder, meaning he never got the proper
treatment. That left his widowed adoptive mother overwhelmed, they said.
The defense
cut their case short, calling only about 25 of the 80 witnesses they said would
testify. They never brought up Cruz’s high school years or called his younger
half-brother, Zachary, whom they accused of bullying.
That will
limit what the prosecution can raise in rebuttal — any evidence or testimony
must have some tie to what the defense presented.
Prosecutors
have said they plan to show racist slurs Cruz wrote on his backpack and online
and the swastikas drawn on the gun he used and the boots he wore. Although
there is no contention that the attack was racially motivated, prosecutors
argue the words and Nazi symbols show his lack of regard for others.
Judge
Scherer rejected an attempt by Cruz’s attorneys to block the swastikas’
presentation, which they argued is unnecessarily provocative. His attorneys
also complained that, despite pretrial motions they filed, Scherer did not rule
they were admissible until after jury selection. That meant they couldn’t ask
prospective panelists whether seeing swastikas would prejudice their verdict.
Jarvis and
Weinstein said the prosecution must be careful about what rebuttal evidence
they present because if they go too far they could risk an appellate court
overturning a death sentence, meaning the case would have to be retried.
“As a
prosecutor, there comes a point in every trial where the longer you’re up
there, you’re only hurting yourself,” Jarvis said. “Have we reached that point
in this trial? I think we have.”