On Thursday, Republican Florida Governor Ron DeSantis reacted to the sentence of the Parkland shooter who murdered 17 people, including 14 high school students, on February 14, 2018.
The jury of seven men and five women deliberated for less than two days before deciding to sentence the shooter to life in prison without parole for the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. The decision not to issue the death penalty shocked victims’ families.
The shooter “showed little emotion as Judge Elizabeth A. Scherer read the jury’s decisions one by one. His victims’ families, in contrast, were horrified and baffled as they learned over and over again that his life had been spared. Outside the courtroom, they expressed outrage and disbelief and questioned the purpose of the death penalty if it is not imposed on a mass murderer of mostly children. Many had assumed that the trade-off for enduring a painful and protracted trial would be a near-certain death sentence,” The New York Times reported.
In response to the news, DeSantis said, “I think that if you have a death penalty at all, that that is a case where you’re massacring those students with premeditation and other disregard for basic humanity, that you deserve the death penalty.”
“And so the jurors came back; apparently it was eleven to one, with one holdout refusing to authorize the ultimate punishment, and that means that this killer’s going to end up getting the same sentence as people who committed bad acts but acts that did not rise to this level,” he continued. “I just don’t think anything else is appropriate except the capital sentence in this case, and so I was very disappointed to see that. I’m also disappointed that we’re four and a half years after these killings and we’re just now getting this.”
“You know, they used to do this: He would have been executed in six months,” DeSantis added. “He’s guilty. Everybody knew that from the beginning, and yet it takes years and years in this legal system that is not serving the interest of victims.”
The only appropriate sentence for the massacre of 17 innocent people is the death penalty. That the jury had a single holdout refuse to authorize a capital sentence represents a miscarriage of justice.
My prayers are with the Parkland families. pic.twitter.com/f2M0Fw1SLo
— Ron DeSantis (@GovRonDeSantis) October 13, 2022
