Florida School Shooting Legal Battle: Should Jurors See Crime Scene?

Prosecutors in the trial of Nikolas Cruz, accused in the 2018 Parkland, Fl., school shooting, say a juror walk through the crime scene at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School is necessary to determine the scope of what occurred during the shooting.

However, the defense counters this  would overwhelm the jury with “vicarious trauma” and make it impossible for them to return to a fair trial and verdict, reports the Sun Sentinel.

On Feb. 14, 2018, 17 people were murdered when a former student, 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz brought an AR-15 style rifle to the school. Last December, Broward Judge Elizabeth Scherer granted the prosecutors motion for a jury view.

Defense lawyers filed a new motion to ask the judge to reconsider, writing “viewing the scene in its current condition will cause additional, unnecessary vicarious trauma to the jurors.”

The trial is tentatively supposed to start this fall, but a hearing date has not been set. Evidence at the trial will already include thousands of crime scene photos, post mortem pictures of each deceased victim, surveillance videos, testimonies from survivors and still photos taken with a 360-degree camera before investigators went into each room.

Prosecutors argue that this won’t be enough to fully grasp the extent of the shooting, and why Cruz needs to be convicted of murder and sentenced to death. Usually, murder trials do not include crime scene visits, although there were some previously in Broward that did have jurors walk through the crime scene, including the 2006 murder of Broward Sheriff Deputy Brian Tephford, and the 2002 murder of a waitress and cook at a Davie Waffle House.

Max Schachter, whose son Alex was one of the victims, said “Looking at pictures and or video is not the same thing as walking the actual hallways and into the classrooms where the victims were murdered.”

Anna Wilder is a TCR Justice Reporting intern.