Parkland shooting trial: Here’s look at the prosecutor’s arguments

The trial is only to decide whether Florida school shooter Nikolas Cruz, who who murdered 14 students and three staff members, is sentenced to death or life without parole.

Warning: This story contains graphic descriptions. Reader discretion is advised.

The prosecutor seeking to sentence Florida school shooter Nikolas Cruz to death let the facts speak for themselves as he presented his case: terrifying witness accounts; heartrending statements from parents and spouses; chilling surveillance videos; gruesome autopsy and crime scene photos; and, as a capstone, Thursday’s jury walk-through of the three-story building where it happened, bloodstains and Valentine’s Day cards still clinging to the floors.

Lead prosecutor Mike Satz, the 80-year-old former Broward County state attorney, then rested his case against the defendant who murdered 14 students and three staff members at Parkland‘s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on Feb. 14, 2018.

Cruz’s attorneys repeatedly objected that Satz’s case went beyond what was legally allowable or necessary and was aimed primarily at inflaming the jurors’ emotions— objections that were denied by Circuit Judge Elizabeth Scherer.

There was never any doubt Satz would be able to prove the killings were “cold, calculated and premeditated,” that Cruz’s actions were “heinous, atrocious or cruel” and “created a great risk to many persons ” and four other aggravating circumstances listed in Florida law that make him eligible for a possible death sentence. But Satz also had to give them heft as they must, in the jurors’ unanimous opinion, “outweigh” the mitigating factors the defense will soon present.

“I didn’t think there were any surprises, but what surprises could there have been?” said Bob Jarvis, a law professor at Nova Southeastern University in suburban Fort Lauderdale. “The jurors knew walking in what Cruz had done. … The question that kept running through my mind was, `Was it too much?”’

“He did a fantastic job,” said David S. Weinstein, a Miami criminal defense attorney and former prosecutor. “He has built a case that I think has given the jury more than enough to find these aggravating factors and was not over-the-top at all.”

After a one-week break, the sides will spend a week without the jury arguing before Judge Scherer over what evidence Cruz’s defense can present about how his birth mother’s drinking and drug abuse during pregnancy affected his brain and whether defects can be seen on scans.