They Found 'Grounds for Mercy' for Nikolas Cruz

In a piece aptly titled "The Hardest Case for Mercy" for the Marshall Project, Joe Sexton delves deep into the defense effort to spare Nikolas Cruz's life. It's not an easy read: The families of the 17 people he shot dead and the 17 others he wounded have largely heaped fury onto the defense team, who spent years looking for mitigating factors that "might be grounds for mercy to be shown." Kate O'Shea was the team's mitigation specialist and spent 5,000 hours delving into Cruz's life—particularly its very start. The boy was adopted at birth by Roger and Lynda Cruz, who had paid about $20,000 to birth mom Brenda Woodard over the course of her pregnancy; at the time she was selling sex, smoking crack, and was drunk essentially daily.

O'Shea tracked her down, along with a woman Woodard had been arrested with at the time who had gotten clean and could fill in details around the alcohol Cruz was exposed to prenatally. Dr. Kenneth Lyons Jones, an expert on the disorders alcohol exposure can cause, spent hundreds of hours on the case and found Cruz to be "just a devastated, destroyed human being. So many things going against him throughout his whole life—all of them related to alcohol." O'Shea also tracked down Jack Vesey, Cruz's middle school principal who worked for months to get Cruz transferred to a specialized school. One of his teachers was so disturbed by his behavior she took notes. Sexton recounts some of what she logged:

"He'd imitate masturbating or giving blow jobs; he brought a crowbar to class; he wanted to know what Abraham Lincoln's assassination sounded like. 'Did people eat the Civil War dead?' he once asked. 'I'm a bad kid. I want to kill.'" Vesey succeeded in getting Cruz moved to a school better suited to his needs in the second half of 8th grade—but Lynda Cruz later reversed the placement. "At his adoptive mother's encouragement, Cruz was permitted to enroll at Marjory Stoneman Douglas," Sexton explains. "Cruz had called Cross Creek 'the retard school.' His mother hated the stigma she felt with him there." Vesey says he was shocked to learn about the transfer. "They didn't believe me when I told them how sick he was," he said of school officials. The jury did; three of 12 jurors voted to spare Cruz's life. (Read the story in full here.)