Jury Spares Parkland Shooter. He Gets Life.

The Parkland school shooter, who murdered 17 people and maimed many others, dodged the death penalty today.

I don’t normally watch trials, but I watched parts of this one. We’ve got to stop these mass shootings. I watched mainly to see if there was anything we could have done to stop this shooting and others like it in the future. 

As I watched it, I concluded that the only reason the jury might not give the shooter the death penalty would be that they simply could not do it. It’s one thing to sit home and watch these things on tv and blather on about what you’d do if you were on the jury. It’s quite another to actually have the power to kill in your hands, to sit in a room with 11 other people and take a vote on whether or not you will, as a group, sentence another human being to death. 

The gap between imagining a thing like that and actually doing it is a big gap. 

I think that the family members of the people who were murdered took the verdict hard. I understand that. They were asking the people on this jury to mete out what would, in all honesty, be a just punishment. I lived through the Oklahoma City bombing. I’ve opposed the death penalty since I was a teen-ager. I opposed putting the bomber to death. 

However, I was surprised by the relief I felt once he was dead. It was good, just to not have to hear about him any longer. Before that, it was like he was tied by a psychic rope to all of us, and the news reports and chatter about him yanked that rope. The death of the bomber was freeing. That surprised me. 

His cohort, who is rotting away in super max, has sunk into oblivion. We don’t hear from him, nor should we. 

I can’t imagine what the families of victims of “star” murderers must go through, watching the endless tv specials and dramatizations and interviews with these scum. There are several dramatizations, replays of interviews and documentaries about Jeffrey Dahmer running right now. 

If there is any vestige of justice in this terrible shooting in Florida, any kindness that can be extended to the families of the victims, it has to be that this shooter will be consigned to Florida’s equivalent of super max, there to rot away his days without press, without attention, without documentaries reliving his savage crime, without dramatizations of his worthless life. Let him be forgot. 

I sympathize with the families of his victims who wanted him dead. I understand completely and absolutely how they feel. I’ve opposed the death penalty ever since I was old enough to consider it. But if it was one of mine who’d been murdered that day, I might very well be calling for their killer’s blood just like these people. 

I also sympathize with the jury. They have had to bear the weight of this whole horrible crime while they studied the evidence, listened to the testimony, toured the killing site. They had to look at the mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers and sons and daughters of the victims, sitting in that courtroom, day after day, hanging on the cross of their grief. 

All of it — every bit of it — came down on that jury. They had to go in a room by themselves and vote — think about that, take a vote — on whether or not another person should live or die. 

If they had given him the death penalty, I would have understood it completely. There was no reason under the law why he should not be given the death penalty. When they chose instead to give him life without parole, I understood that too. 

I don’t know their deliberations. But I do know that the endless appeals and rancorous public debate surrounding the death penalty have rendered it almost impracticable. That may have weighed in their considerations. Giving the death penalty is at best an iffy proposition that drags everyone, including the public, through a torturous slog of appeals, cries for mercy and endless re-tellings of the murder. Life without parole starts the day the sentence is handed down.

The one thing I do believe is that this shooter should never be free again. If we can’t keep these people locked up for life, then we have to make the death penalty work. 

I also know that we’ve got to stop these mass shootings. After watching this trial, I’ve come to the conclusion that “mental health care” as it applies to a possible way of stopping mass shootings is just a political slogan. We’re a hundred years away from mental health care having the scientific chops to do anything like that. Many shooters were under the care of mental health professionals. Many of them, like this shooter, had been under the care of mental health professionals for years. 

I have no problem with intelligent gun control. But I don’t think that is going to solve this problem, either. It might stop a few shootings, and each shooting stopped is a victory. But it won’t stop most of the mass killings. 

One thing I’ve been wondering — and part of why I watched a good bit of this trial — is if we actually did start giving the death penalty to these shooters, would that prevent some of these young men from moving forward with their plans to commit such a crime? I know that there are claims that the death penalty does not serve as a preventative, but I think those claims are based on bogus analysis. 

It doesn’t tell you anything to ask convicted killers if the fear of the death penalty stopped them. No. It didn’t stop them. What you’d have to do is poll the people who didn’t commit murders because of fear of the death penalty, and that’s impossible to do. 

The point I’m making is that claims that the death penalty has no preventative function are just conjecture. There is absolutely no way to prove that, one way or the other. 

The truth is, the death penalty has become so non-functional that it’s ability to act as a preventative is almost non-existent. The violent criminals I’ve known — and I grew up in and represented a violent section of the population — are not what you’d call deep thinkers.  They see on the news that the death penalty takes decades to enforce, and they dismiss it from their considerations. As far as your average violent adolescent male is concerned, we’re already living in a world without a death penalty. 

I’ve always opposed the death penalty. But Uvalde pushed me past set thinking. We’ve got to stop these shootings, and that means re-thinking all our set ideas about how to deal with this, since they so obviously are not working. We need to back off from our preconceived ideas and put everything out on the table.

So, I wonder; if these young men with guns actually saw some of their heroes going down with the death penalty, would it affect them? Would they change their plans? I don’t know the answer to that, and neither does anyone else. 

I’ve read that the popular story right now is that mass shooters are committing suicide by murder. Back when they always shot themselves when they finished murdering other people, that seemed to fit. There wasn’t any way to be sure of their deeper motives, but as an explanation, suicide by murder was consistent with both writings and videos they used to memorialize their actions, and their subsequent suicides.

 But today’s shooters are not only not shooting themselves, they’re attempting — and sometimes succeeding — to leave the scene and run for their lives. That isn’t suicide. It’s mass murder. 

I’ve also read that a couple of self-described “sought after experts” have put together a database of mass shooters. They claim they’ve found the Rosetta Stone to ending these shootings. Their magic database tells us. All you have to do is donate to their “project” and buy their book. 

I’ve debated about buying that book. But I find the sell job off-putting. It smacks too much of Honest Jack Applebaum’s Magic Elixir. If they’ve found a way to stop mass shootings, maybe they should just tell everybody what it is instead of requiring people to buy their book and donate to their “project” to find out. 

Personally, I don’t think there is a magic elixir for this. We’d all like a button we could push and — poof !! — the evil young man with the big gun would go away. 

But it took us a long time to make our society this sick. We’ve reached a kind of critical mass of crazy in our society, and mass shootings are just one of the many symptoms of societal and cultural dissolution. 

Would the imposition of the death penalty for mass shooters stop a few young men from going ahead with their plans? I think that if they believed it was a real deal and they were likely to receive the death penalty and then be executed in a timely fashion, the answer is yes. 

I oppose the death penalty. I’ve always opposed the death penalty, and I have the votes to prove it. But I’m not going to lie to make my anti-death-penalty case. I believe that the death penalty when it is imposed with reasonable certainty and within a reasonable time frame does serve as a preventative to murder. Not all murders. But quite a few of them.  

What all this means for the Parkland shooter is that he will receive 17 sentences of life without parole and probably other sentences for the people he wounded. Hopefully, he will never get free and the public won’t be marinated in his evil over and over again via lurid dramatizations, documentaries and interviews. 

His victims are silent as the grave. 

Let him be as silent as they are.