Does Nikolas Cruz Deserve To Die? With prosecutors planning to seek the death penalty for the Parkland shooter, the debate continues over capital punishment in the U.S.

AuthorSmith, Patricia
PositionNATIONAL

When Nikolas Cruz killed 17 people in a shooting rampage at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in Parkland, Florida, in February, he committed one of the most horrifying crimes in recent memory.

Now authorities in Florida say that Cruz, 19, deserves to die for his actions. Prosecutors intend to seek the death penalty.

"This is certainly the kind of case the death penalty was designed for," says Michael Satz, the prosecutor in Broward County, where the massacre occurred.

But not everyone agrees that death is the right punishment, including some parents of Cruz's victims.

"I want him to sit in a cell and rot for the rest of his life," Andrew Pollack told CNN. Pollack's 18-year-old daughter, Meadow, was killed at Stoneman Douglas.

The tension between these points of view reflects the broader debate over the ethics and usefulness of capital punishment. Should the government put people to death? Does the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution, which prohibits "cruel and unusual punishment," allow it? And is death the right punishment for the worst crimes?

Opposition to the death penalty has been growing in the U.S.: 19 states have abolished capital punishment--including Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maryland, and New Mexico in the past decade. New Hampshire's legislature voted this year to abolish the death penalty, but the governor vetoed the measure. For some states, the high cost of carrying out death sentences has been a factor.

The number of annual executions in the U.S. has declined from 98 in 1999 to 23 in 2017 (see map, p. 17). The number of new death sentences imposed has also dropped dramatically--from 295 in 1998 to 39 last year.

A majority of Americans--55 percent, according to Gallup--say they support the death penalty for convicted murderers. But that number has dropped considerably since 1994, when 80 percent of Americans supported it. In August, Pope Francis declared that the death penalty is wrong in all cases.

"We're seeing that the death penalty has more and more fallen out of favor, and it's being used in fewer and fewer places," says Diann Rust-Tierney of the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty. "It's inconsistent with American values."

'Anything Else Is Not Justice'

But that's not how death penalty supporters see it. "There are some murder cases for which anything else is just not justice," says Kent Scheidegger of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, a victims rights group.

Scheidegger also believes that putting a convicted murderer to death is the only sure way to prevent that person from doing harm again.

"People sentenced to life in prison do sometimes kill again, either in prison or by ordering an execution on the outside, and sometimes they do escape," he says. "But people who have been executed never kill again."

The morality of capital punishment has long been debated. Many death penalty supporters interpret the biblical phrase "an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth" to mean that those who commit murder should meet the same fate.

Death penalty supporters say that capital punishment serves as a deterrent, stopping would-be killers, since they fear the possibility of execution. And many think that putting a killer to death can bring some closure and sense of justice to a victim's family.

Opponents say killing is wrong no matter who is doing it, even if it's the government, and that it's too final a punishment in a world where mistakes can happen. Indeed, since 1973,162 death row inmates have been exonerated, based on DNA and other evidence.

Opponents also point to statistics that indicate the death penalty discriminates against African-Americans, who make up 12 percent of the U.S. population but more than 40 percent of death row inmates.

Internationally, more than two-thirds of the world's countries, including all of Europe except Belarus, have abolished the death penalty. According to Amnesty International, the countries that execute the most people are China, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. (In 2017, the U.S. ranked eighth on the list.)

"Virtually no democracy in the world has the death penalty, except the United States," says Jordan Steiker, a law professor at the University of Texas who's written a book on the death penalty. Most other countries that use capital punishment are autocratic regimes or countries that use it to punish high crimes such as treason, he says.

"The U.S. is such a remarkable outlier in its continued use of the death penalty for ordinary crimes," Steiker says.

The Supreme Court

The death penalty in the U.S. dates to colonial times, when European settlers brought capital punishment to the New World. For centuries, hanging was the most common method. By the 1950s, most states were using either the gas chamber or electrocution.

In 1972, the Supreme Court seemed to be on the verge of declaring capital punishment unconstitutional, because it said the standards for applying it were arbitrary and inconsistent. Instead, the Court imposed a moratorium on executions until states could ensure that it was being reserved for the worst offenders. The death penalty was reintroduced in 1976.

Since then, more than 1,480 people have been put to death, most by lethal injection. Looking for a method of execution that would be more humane and less gruesome than the electric chair or...

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