Even Broward County’s public defender, whose office is representing Mr. Cruz and who wants to save his life, readily acknowledges the wrenching emotions that are part of a case that is only beginning.
“If it were my daughter, I would want to personally kill my client, make no mistake about it,” said Howard Finkelstein, the public defender, an elected position.
Later, though, he said that perhaps he would “try to go on and build a future. I don’t know what I would do. I just don’t know.”
Already, Mr. Finkelstein’s office has offered a way to avoid a trial: Mr. Cruz’s guilty plea in exchange for a punishment of 17 consecutive life sentences without parole. But Mr. Finkelstein recognizes that for some victims, that might not be enough: “I’m a father. I don’t know whether I would take my offer.”
Relatives of the victims of the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., have not yet made their feelings about the death penalty widely known. And it is not clear where Michael J. Satz, Broward County’s prosecutor, is in his deliberations. He declined to comment.------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mr. Satz, who was elected state attorney when Gerald R. Ford was president, is regarded as a hard-edged prosecutor, but he is still likely to consider an array of factors, including the odds of persuading a jury.
Although jurors condemned men for massacres in Charleston, S.C., where nine churchgoers were killed, and at Fort Hood, Tex., where there were 13 fatalities, they spared the life of the Aurora gunman who killed 12, citing his history of mental illness. In the Huntsville shooting, the prosecutor said his conversations with the families of the victims were a reason he did not seek execution.
George Brauchler, the lead prosecutor in the Aurora case, said he had engaged in “serious soul-searching” about whether to pass up a plea deal and seek the death penalty. “This is as much a moral decision as it is a decision about justice, and that is not an easy decision to make,” he said.
“Until you are signing your name to a piece of paper that starts the machinery of government against another human being to take their life, whether it’s deserved or not, you don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Mr. Brauchler said he had met with his Roman Catholic priest, and conferred with family members of the victims as well as survivors of the attack. Some of the conversations were tense and punctuated by yelling. Some people urged a measure of mercy for the gunman, Mr. Brauchler recalled, while others said, “I want to put the needle in his arm.” In the end, Mr. Brauchler said, he did not find the gunman’s mental illness defense credible.
Death penalty cases are the criminal justice system’s most complex, expensive and emotionally taxing. It can take weeks or even months to present volumes of evidence that can include autopsy after autopsy and the painstaking recollection of every crack or boom of gunfire and every word the killer uttered.
The trials can wear down even the most experienced experts. When it came time to cross-examine a survivor of the Charleston attack, a defense lawyer, David I. Bruck, said only: “Ms. Sheppard, I’m so sorry. I have no questions.”
A crucial consideration in potential capital cases, prosecutors and defense lawyers said, is whether failing to seek the death penalty in a mass shooting would set a precedent, making it more difficult to seek it in cases with lower death tolls.
In Charleston, the federal government had a sharp internal debate, and met with resistance from family members of victims, before it decided to seek the death penalty against Dylann S.
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