The father of a teacher and coach who was slaughtered in the Feb. 14, 2018, mass shooting in Parkland, Fla., is urging prosecutors to drop the death penalty against the gunman and to instead let him “rot in jail for the rest of his life.”
Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School geography teacher and cross-country coach Scott Biegel 35, was one of the 17 people killed by confessed gunman Nikolas Cruz.
His grieving dad, Michael Schulman, of Dix Mills, N.Y., in an opinion piece for the South Florida Sun Sentinel, said the agony of a long-drawn out trial would be excruciating — and may still not end with Cruz’s death.
“To State Attorney Michael Satz, and to the living victims of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas massacre, let the shooter rot in jail for the rest of his life,” Schulman pleaded. “Let us try and get some closure! Let us try and move forward with our lives.”
Schulman argued “‘going for the death penalty’ will not bring our loved ones back to us.”
“It will not make the physical scars of those wounded go away. In fact, what it will do is to continue the trauma and not allow the victims to heal and get closure,” he wrote.
And he argued a death penalty decision by prosecutors would require survivors and victims’ family members to take part in a large-scale trial, and likely, weeks of testimony. The state reportedly plans to call 435 people — including 84 present or former high school students — as major witnesses, The Hill noted.
“We would be putting ourselves through this for the chance that the shooter would get what we all believe he deserves: the death penalty,” Schulman wrote.
“Yet, even following a trial, the shooter could be sentenced to life without parole — the same sentence the shooter has already agreed to accept for in exchange for a guilty plea. Pursuing the death penalty means subjecting ourselves to the trauma of a trial, reliving the murder of our loved ones for a result we could have obtained without that trauma.”
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