Would a Death Sentence Help The Parkland Families Heal?

After a Florida jury voted to sentence Nikolas Cruz to life in prison earlier this month for the murders of 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, news coverage focused on the disappointment and rage of his victims’ families. Many of them wanted the death penalty, and some will speak in court at his sentencing on Nov. 1.

Cruz’s trial featured days of defense testimony about his adversities, including his mother’s drug and alcohol use while he was developing in utero. That was his right — the Supreme Court long ago said, when the death penalty is on the table, juries must consider the whole person, not just the single crime — but it left the impression that Cruz had won a sympathy contest. “This jury failed our families today,” Fred Guttenberg, the father of Jaime Guttenberg, told reporters. Soon after, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis suggested that state law, which requires a unanimous jury vote for death, might be changed to “be better serving victims of crime, and the families of victims.”

Victims’ families have never been systematically polled, but there is an assumption among reporters (which I used to share) that they usually want the harshest available punishment. Over the last decade, while interviewing dozens of family members of people whose killers faced the death penalty, I’ve come to see that this simply isn’t true, and that treating victims decently means avoiding assumptions about what they want.