If you live in South Florida, the nightly news is spending a lot of time on the penalty phase trial for Nikolas Cruz.
Jury selection is ongoing, and is expected to last another full month, and the trial, once underway is expected to last as long as six months.
Apparently, here in Florida, we want to ensure that only the “worst of the worst” are actually executed, according to some legal pundits.
The two choices available are either life in prison, or for young Mr. Cruz to be executed. Since he has plead guilty to 17 capital crimes, those choices appear to be the only option, and the Broward county taxpayer now has to foot the bill for an excruciatingly long process just to make sure that we don’t abuse his rights.
I took a new job in 1998 and just as fall was starting, took up residence in Denver, Colorado, working from one of the upper floors of an office building on the south edge of the metropolitan area. In April of 1999, Columbine happened, and shocked the entire country.
It seems that within weeks, then entire population of crazy people decided that a mass shooting event was the only way to get attention. In July of 1999 we had 11 dead in Atlanta, in December 2000 7 dead in Massachusetts, In March 2001, Santana High School. The list, unfortunately goes on, and continues to this day, including the Aurora theatre shooting in July of 2012, a theatre that was only two blocks from where I once lived and one in which I had seen several movies.
We’ve actually become so inured of these events that sometimes they don’t even make the top of the daily national news anymore. As I have told my friends often, you cannot legislate crazy, and since guns are as easy to get as chewing gum, crazies are going to use guns because, well, why not?
It seems that within weeks, then entire population of crazy people decided that a mass shooting event was the only way to get attention. In July of 1999 we had 11 dead in Atlanta, in December 2000 7 dead in Massachusetts, In March 2001, Santana High School. The list, unfortunately goes on, and continues to this day, including the Aurora theatre shooting in July of 2012, a theatre that was only two blocks from where I once lived and one in which I had seen several movies.
We’ve actually become so inured of these events that sometimes they don’t even make the top of the daily national news anymore. As I have told my friends often, you cannot legislate crazy, and since guns are as easy to get as chewing gum, crazies are going to use guns because, well, why not?
But, as pragmatic as I am, strangely I find myself torn about young Mr. Cruz.
For one thing, usually the crazed perpetrator in these heinous crazed events are usually killed and we don’t get to have a trial and we end up listening to a bunch of pundits who know nothing about the people involved try to make up a reason that we can live with for this many more people being slaughtered.
This time, we have a live perpetrator who has graciously plead guilty, and we still end up twisting out own tails into knots about what to do with him.
I’m torn about the death penalty. I have heard too many cases of people on death row being found innocent either just before we were to execute them, or even worse, after we’ve already done the deed. But at the same time, if it was one of my kids who was killed, I’d want to personally tear out his liver and eat it.
In this case, there is no doubt who did it, and there simply cannot be any extenuating circumstance that would excuse the execution of 17 innocent young people. I cannot think of anything he could disclose that could possibly justify the actions he took. Nothing.
But still, I am glad I am not in that jury pool. I cannot tell you which way I would go. I don’t have a car in that race so I’m about as neutral as you can get, having seen some of the details and lived in the same county.
I just wish we didn’t have to spend so much time and effort on this lost human. He plead guilty. We either throw him in prison and lose the key, or we execute him. We shouldn’t need to put 17 families through the anguish again, we shouldn’t need to spend millions of taxpayer dollars on the process. There has to be a way to make this decision in less than 3/4 of a year.
