A Florida prosecutor says this week’s mass shooting at a South Florida high school is “the type of case the death penalty was designed for.”
The comment from state attorney Michael Satz came in response to a public defender floating a potential guilty plea for the accused shooter, Nikolas Cruz, 19, in exchange for prosecutors declining to pursue the death penalty.
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“This was a highly calculated and premeditated murder of 17 people and the attempted murder of everyone in that school,” Satz, a state attorney for the Broward County, where the shooting took place, said in statement released Saturday.
The statement from Satz said his office would “announce our formal position at the appropriate time” on the shooting suspect’s case, ABC News reported.
Officials say Cruz, a student who was previously expelled from the Parkland, Fla., high school for disciplinary reasons, opened fire on Wednesday with a semi-automatic weapon, killing 17 students and faculty and injuring more than a dozen others.
Cruz is willing to plead guilty to the 17 counts of premeditated murder to avoid Florida’s death penalty, his public defender said Friday.
Howard Finkelstein said Cruz would plead guilty in exchange for prosecutors taking the death penalty off the table and allowing for life in prison without parole.
“We have an opportunity to begin to put this behind us, to help the victims’ families as much as we can and begin to heal as a community,” Finkelstein said.
Cruz faces his next court date on Monday, and is currently being held without bail.