I doubt there’s much to learn that we don’t already know. It’s really not rocket science, and of course brain surgery would be both premature and unethical at this point in time.
I should be clear, though: I am glad enough of the members of the jury realized that the death penalty would be pointless here, and so rendered an appropriate decision. I only wish more juries would come around to that line of thinking.
I wish all of our legislatures would realize the death penalty is barbaric and ban it.
Apparently things got a bit heated during deliberations. The prosecutor is requesting an investigation into perceived threats to one of the jurors
During my usual browsing of CNN I saw that they were streaming the family impact statements prior to the formal sentencing. I was going to tune in just for a moment but this is very emotional stuff. Some of the speeches were worthy of a professional dramatic production. Really quite riveting and it puts a real-life perspective on a tragedy that would otherwise be just a news story.
Wow, the killer’s public defenders are really being raked over the coals, and they have indeed transgressed the bounds of decency by arguing with the judge about how much they’ve had to “endure” during this trial, and that the judge would be more sympathetic if it was her own children that were being threatened, until the judge told one of them to sit down and then changed her mind and told her to get out of her courtroom.
In his concluding remarks, one of the family members giving an impact statement said there were two things he wanted to see by the end of the day: the life sentence for the killer, and the resignation of Gordon Weekes, the lead public defender for Broward County.
Is that now the justice system should work? Lawyers who defend bad people should lose their jobs so no one can defend bad people anymore? Oh, and their children threatened for their trouble!
Seems like if anything, it’s the DA who should resign. Whether for their office’s failure to get the “desired” sentence, or for their wasting the people’s time an money trying to execute a mentally ill wreck of a human life to begin with.
You really should make an effort to check up on the facts and find out what this controversy was really about before you start pontificating. There were a whole bunch of incidents with these public defenders in this trial. One was that a video camera showed one of the killer’s lawyers conferring with him and laughing and giving the middle finger, and later being forced to apologize, but apparently apologizing more for being caught than for the gross disrespect to the proceedings.
Then there was this (sorry, I referred to the attorney in question as “she” due to my faulty recollection – the asshole who was dismissed was David Wheeler; the lead defender Gordon Weekes is his boss). Check this out. This is not about “public defenders should lose their jobs because I hate the criminal they’re defending”, this is about these lawyers being an unethical pack of bums. All of them, including Melissa MacNeil.
And then there was this:
Without jurors present, state Judge Elizabeth Scherer went on to criticize the defense for “another day wasted” in a trial that has seen numerous delays and postponements.
“Even if you didn’t make your decision until this morning, to have 22 people, plus all of the staff and every attorney, march into court and be waiting as if it’s some kind of game – now I have to send them home,” she said. “The state’s not ready, they’re not going to have a witness ready. We have another day wasted.”
“I honestly, I have never experienced (this) level of unprofessionalism in my career,” Scherer said. “It’s unbelievable.”
McNeil started to respond: “You’re insulting me on the record in front of my client, and I believe that I should be able to defend myself,” the attorney said.
But the judge stopped her, saying, “You’ve been insulting me the entire trial, blatantly. Taking your headphones off, arguing with me, storming out, coming late intentionally if you don’t like my rulings. So, quite frankly, this has been long overdue.”
https://www.cnn.com/2022/09/14/us/nikolas-cruz-parkland-shooting-defense-rests/index.html
Like I said, a pack of bums. And it’s their boss, the lead public defender for Broward County, who some of the parents would like to see resign, for assembling such a pack of inept and disrespectful morons.
I’m going to apply a heavy grain of salt to that.
A confessed mass murderer of children got a life sentence. People don’t like that and they think the attorneys who defended him must be scum. That’s my take, and I’m sticking to it, selective and obscenely biased reporting be damned.
Also, is this judge elected and/or potentially subject to recall as a great many state court judges are? That might further explain her hostility to the defense. Having the audacity to ask her to respect the rights of a murderer in a public trial with extensive media coverage. That’s (and here I’m not kidding) the sort of thing that can get a judge run out of office!
Suit yourself. I’m going to side with the facts. In addition to the evidence I presented, there was also the fact that the “defense” wasn’t really doing much defending; the perp pleaded guilty, and the extent of the defense was to ask for a life sentence rather than the death penalty. The reason for the hate – including from an exasperated judge – wasn’t that they were “defending” him by trying to get him acquitted, it was because they were all uniformly so obnoxious. “Biased” press reporting? Watch the video. Read the CNN article – specifically the actual verbatim quotes.
Yes, uniformly obnoxious in that they dared to argue a confessed child murderer shouldn’t spend the next twenty years on death row going through appeal after appeal after appeal when instead he could just quietly rot in one of Florida’s luxurious maximum security prisons. Probably kept going on and on and on about things like “rights” and “medical experts” and “mitigation.” WTF is that, anyway, mitigation? Sounds like another word for the gag reflex.
The obnoxious fucks.
If you think things haven’t been cherry-picked and hyper focused on because of the nature of the crime and the defendant, then you’re fucking blind. This was every bit about the outrage that the murderer here might actually get a chance to die in prison in 40 years instead of 20.
From what I understand, what the families are upset about is how they defended the life sentence versus the death penalty. They argued that Cruz was mentally ill and fell through the cracks and never got help and was unloved and brain damaged. Which was all either flat out untrue or unhelpful to actual mentally ill/brain damaged people.
The father of one of the victims made a statement that made it pretty clear, I thought. There is so much terrible grief and anger and hatred in that room.
I really don’t know what set you off like this. Did you watch the two days of the sentencing phase of the trial? I didn’t see the first day live, when a lot of the fireworks occurred, but I did watch the second day (today) and videos of the first. The nature of the anger was pretty clear to me. It wasn’t about defense lawyers being defense lawyers – some of the speakers made that explicitly clear. All lawyers have a job to do, and everyone is entitled to one. It was about them being soulless jerks who violated court decorum and every standard of decency. You probably haven’t even watched the video I posted which was just one small example. Some of them treated the judge the way that a rebellious juvenile delinquent in school might treat a teacher that he hated. It genuinely raises the question of what the hell is wrong with the Broward County public defender’s office.
This may well have been part of it, it’s true. But as other family members said, it may indeed be more just for him to live out a horrible prison life in maximum security with the worst of the worst, and then likely die a horrible death there, rather than the legally required mercy of the state death penalty. I actually tend to agree. Even more so since the death penalty has no place in a civilized society.
ETA: And as much as the death penalty has no place in civilized society, neither does “prison justice”. I can’t blame the family members for telling him and hoping that he will be in constant fear of his life, but that’s not something I champion. Rather, I believe he should be – and will be – deprived of even such minimal comforts and conveniences as a maximum security institution may afford. One of the judge’s orders at sentencing is that “commissary fees” will be garnished. I wasn’t sure what that meant, but looking it up, a prison commissary is kind of a store where you can buy various things either with money contributed from the outside, or through wages earned in prison jobs. He won’t get any of that. He’s also prohibited from receiving or gifting any money from book or movie rights. And he’s never getting out. He is, in short, well and thoroughly fucked.
See, actually, I did. And what I see is someone scratching their head, and then some immature little shit next to them (by which I mean Cruz) saying “heh, it’s like you’re flicking me off!” and then some nervous laughter from the unexpecting head-scratcher stuck sitting next to a murderer as their duty as a public servant. You know, like how people react when under stress. Kind of how like you can probably find freeze frames of Hillary Clinton (or really any politician) giving what looks like a Hitler salute, except then when you play the rest of the clip it turns out they were just waving.
I see grieving families who are, understandably, going to have a hard time accepting that the death penalty might be what they want, but it is simply not the law’s purpose to give victims or their survivors what they might want in the moment.
I see a prosecutor’s office frustrated it might have to put in a few extra days work if it wants to stick a needle in this particular defendant’s arm. They can’t count on defense attorneys to be too embarrassed to put up a defense like they used to in the days of trials amounting to a venue for judicially-appointed lynch mobs.
I see a probably elected judge who doesn’t want to appear soft on crime, and so letting grieving family members run roughshod over defense attorneys rather than maintain decorum, and then blowing up on the defense attorneys when they throw the bullshit flag.
These people–the defense attorneys–defended a child murderer, specifically with respect to the death penalty. They did it by vigorously arguing on his behalf, citing mental illness and a bad childhood as among other factors that might give rise to mitigation. For this, they are to be vilified in the press, because fuck them because they decided to take on a relatively low-paying job as public defenders and get an indigent child murderer as a client, right?
I cannot believe you do not see this. It’s so. fucking. obvious.
Oddly enough, if I feel the need to scratch my head, I don’t do it with an upraised middle finger, and I would especially not do it in court when I don’t like what the judge is saying, and then I would most especially not burst into giggling laughter with my client during a murder trial in which said client had murdered 14 children, 3 teachers, and injured dozens more. But never mind. You just want to argue. You just want to tell me how stupid I am for not agreeing with you, because you’re “so obviously” right. I’ll just point out that the middle-finger thing was just a two-second outtake from a much longer video in which numerous other asinine transgressions of these idiot lawyers were evident, and still more in the article that I partially quoted from and linked.
Congratulations, I would honestly have never believed that my innocent post about how emotionally moving the families’ testimony was could have turned into a confrontational Pit shit-fest, but you managed it.
You are uncritically accepting the reports of grieving families, an elected judge, prosecutors in an adversarial system within a deep red state with a taste for the death penalty, and sensationalized/cherry-picked media reports when it comes to describing the conduct of defense attorneys who have just succeeded in sparing their child-murdering client from the death penalty. As if there wouldn’t be a strong incentive for all of these parties to represent those attorneys in the worst possible light, and a concomitant tendency for the general public to—as you have—accept and repeat such reports at face value. Because who the fuck would ever stand up for someone who could defend the murderer of so many children, right?
So congratulations on that, I guess. You’re just like everyone else.
ETA: But, I mean, if these defense attorneys are such a shit-show… what must that say about the prosecution, if they couldn’t get their desired outcome, or the judge for apparently being unable to prevent these big bad public defenders with commanding five-figure salaries from making a comedy of the state’s attempt to stick a needle in the arm of a mentally ill wreck of a human being? Once more, I’m left wondering why—even if the reports are actually 100% true and accurate—it’s the public defender that should get fired, rather than the DA or the judge. I mean which is it, are they dealing with circus clowns or reincarnations of Clarence Darrow?
I saw on a news article this morning that some of the family members, during the victim impact statements, stated that they hoped the killer gets raped and murdered while in prison. There’s no way that’s justice.
I don’t like that some victims’ family members said stuff like that. I totally understand why they would wish for only the worst for Cruz and do understand why they would want to address him during sentencing.
I’m not sure what it accomplishes, though. Anything they say to Cruz probably goes in one ear and out the other at best. And it just puts more hateful rhetoric into the world.
I totally get why they would want the death penalty for him, too. But a life sentence instead is not mercy FOR him, it’s society granting undeserved mercy so that it (society) doesn’t become more like him (Cruz). I wish more people could see it that way. It’s probably too much to ask from the victims, but I wish our society could see it more than it does.
Personally, I don’t understand wishing someone gets raped. Maybe that’s a flaw in my character. I do understand hoping the court sentences somone to death, although I disagree with that as I am absolutely against capital punishment. I simply do not understand hoping someone gets murdered. Maybe that’s another flaw in my character.
Also, I despise the way victim impact statements are currently conducted. If it’s something the judge is supposed to take into consideration when deciding a sentence, then those statements need to be conducted with the same legal rigor as the rest of the trial. Maybe that’s yet another flaw in my character.
I don’t think that parent wants justice. I know I wouldn’t, in their place.
I’d want revenge.
The court should be the vengeance system, not the judicial system?