That depends on who's answering the question.
 | By Susannah Meadows Senior Staff Editor, Opinion |
When a jury declined last month to give Nikolas Cruz the death penalty for the murder of 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., family members of the victims expressed their anger and disappointment. "The monster that killed them gets to live another day," said Tony Montalto, who lost his daughter Gina in the 2018 mass shooting. Yesterday, some family members spoke at Cruz's formal sentencing hearing. "I feel betrayed by our judicial system," Meghan Petty, whose sister Alaina was killed, said in her statement. She called Cruz "a remorseless monster who deserves no mercy." |
Witnessing their anguish, it is easy to believe that sentencing Cruz to death would have offered the families some kind of relief. |
In a guest essay this week, Sharon Risher cautions against such an assumption. She, too, has seen a jury decide the fate of her family members' killer — Dylann Roof, who murdered nine people at Mother Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston, S.C., in 2015, including Risher's mother and two of her cousins. Unlike Cruz, Roof received the death penalty for what he did. |
Risher understands how the families of the Parkland victims feel. As she writes, "How can families of victims not want vengeance for what the killer has done?" But she describes how the endless appeals that Roof's sentence has brought, and the headlines they generate, reopen her family's wounds. |
"I would never tell anyone how to feel in such a situation. I can only share my own story," she writes. "I can say that Mr. Roof's death sentence did not bring my family closure. It only prolonged our agony." |
In another guest essay for Times Opinion, Robert Blecker, a professor emeritus at New York Law School, argues that sparing Cruz's life fails the victims themselves. Of the four major justifications for punishment that society recognizes — deterrence, rehabilitation, incapacitation and retribution — it's the last one, he says, that "can help restore a moral balance." |
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