Friday, September 20

Lawyers for the Parkland massacre gunman want to abolish certain words at trial


Nikolas Cruz durante una audiencia en 2018.
Nikolas Cruz during a hearing at 2018.

Photo: Mike Stocker / Getty Images

Nikolas Cruz , accused of perpetrating one of the worst recent killings in The United States appeared in a South Florida courtroom on Wednesday as defense attorneys discussed the language that would or should not be used at his trial.

Nikolas Cruz is accused of kill Stoneman Douglas, in Parkland, Florida, on 14 February 2018. That event was described and is known like the Parkland massacre.

His lawyer, Melisa McNeill, asked in the motion that the judge in charge of the case prohibit using words such as “murderer”, “massacre” and “mass shooter” during the process.

“We are not doing ning an effort, as the State has alleged, to minimize what happened, “said McNeill during the hearing this Wednesday in a court in South Florida, in which Cruz himself appeared, from 22 years.

“The evidence speaks by itself, and it is not necessary to invite error in the file with these damaging references, “said the defense regarding the use of the aforementioned words, something with which the Prosecutor’s Office did not agree.

“That’s what he did. It was a massacre to shoot all those people with a weapon of war. He knew what he was doing, he wrote it all down, it was all on his cell phone ”, said Schulman Beigel, whose son, Scott, professor and school, died in the massacre trying to save several students.

Beigel followed today’s audience through Zoom, according to Local 10 .

Nikolas Cruz, a former student of this center, was then a young man from 19 troubled years who had been in psychiatric treatment and had ties to a local supremacist group.

On Cruz they weigh 17 charges of premeditated murder, one for each person killed in the shooting that occurred about 20 minutes before the conclusion of the school day.

The investigation indicates that Cruz, expelled from the institute after a fight with his ex-girlfriend’s partner, activated smoke grenade fire alerts and, when his former classmates left the classrooms, he started firing a gun.

As the process prior to this trial for the death penalty is four years, the defense represents a young man of 22 years who the nation saw being imprisoned that day in February of 2018. Someone who, in his own videos, called himself the school’s next shooter.

“When they adequately describe the defendant and what did, what do you call an event where someone walks into a school and kills 17 innocent people? That is a massacre ”, affirmed during today’s hearing the prosecutor Nicole Chiappone.

It is expected that this week the judge will issue a ruling on the exclusion or not of the aforementioned words in the trial, whose final date has not been set yet, but It is known that it will be open doors and with the presence of the media.

The Prosecutor’s Office will request capital punishment for the young man and The defense has repeatedly said that Cruz is willing to plead guilty to be sentenced to life imprisonment rather than death.