Parkland Families Sound Off on Death Penalty as Jury Begins to Deliberate

As the Parkland, Florida, school shooting trial winds down, a 12-person jury will be sequestered and begin deliberating Wednesday regarding if the shooter should be sentenced to death or life in prison. Deliberation could last several days. Many of the victims' parents indicate they hope the jury will choose the death penalty.

The jury heard closing arguments from prosecutor Michael Satz and the shooter's defense attorney Melisa McNeill Tuesday morning. Jury members will be sequestered overnight as they decide on gunman Nikolas Cruz's sentencing for the February 14, 2018, shooting that killed 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, and injured 17 others. Family members of the 17 victims differ on their stances on invoking Florida's death penalty.

If the jury is to recommend the death penalty, the decision must be unanimous. The judge can choose to follow that decision or to sentence the shooter to life in prison instead. Parents of some of the victims took to Twitter to express their support for a possible death sentence before closing arguments.

Max Schachter, the father of Alex Schachter, who was murdered in English class during the massacre, tweeted Monday afternoon that typical anti-death penalty rationale doesn't apply in the Parkland school shooter case, as the shooter already pleaded guilty to 17 counts of murder. Schachter argued that the shooter was not wrongfully accused, there was no racial or economic bias and that the shooter is not intellectually disabled, and therefore should be sentenced to death for murdering 17 people.

"You can be against the death penalty & still support it for the trial of the worst high school murderer (Parkland)," Schachter tweeted.

McNeill argued that Cruz was intellectually disabled and said he was subject to fetal alcohol syndrome disorder as his birth mother allegedly drank alcohol and did drugs while pregnant.

"He was doomed from the womb," McNeill said during closing arguments. "In a civilized, humane society, do we kill brain-damaged, mentally ill, broken people? To take a life when life has been lost is revenge, not justice."

Satz argued that Cruz was heinous, atrocious and cruel beyond any doubt and that his act was cold, calculated and pre-meditated. Satz cited evidence of the shooter looking up school bell schedules and researching other school shootings in his closing argument. Satz reminded the jury that when asked why he stopped shooting, Cruz said he "couldn't find anyone to kill."

"The appropriate sentence for Nikolas Cruz is the death penalty," Satz said in his closing argument.

Fred Guttenberg, whose daughter Jaime was killed during the shooting, told Newsweek a year ago that he hoped the shooter would "pay the ultimate price" and be sentenced to death for killing 14 students and three staff members. Guttenberg tweeted an update Tuesday morning, expressing hope that the trial will conclude this week.

"This trial has been harder on us than you could imagine, and we are ready to have this in our rear view," he tweeted.

However, some family members don't agree with the death penalty. Carmen Schentrup was one of the 14 students killed during the massacre. Her brother Robert told CNN that he doesn't believe the shooter should be sentenced to death.

"Logically, it doesn't follow for me that we say, 'Murdering someone is this horrible, heinous, awful, terrible thing, and in order to prove that point, we're going to do it to someone else,'" he said.

Schentrup's parents disagree with him on his stance, and they are hoping for a death penalty verdict for their daughter's killer.

"I love but disagree with my son," Carmen Schentrup's mother, April, tweeted in July. "If police did their job that day the shooter would've been killed at MSD. Since they didn't do what was needed then, let the court get it right this time. Carmen's murderer deserves the death penalty."