Saving Nikolas Cruz's Life – ANG's 100th Episode Special

All right, here it is, our 100th episode, and it's a special one.

We have Casey Secor, one of the defense attorneys on the Parkland shooter case,

and Katie O'Shea, the mitigation specialist,

both of whom were part of the defense team that saved Nicholas Cruz's life.

This is our first Capitol case we've had on another Not Guilty.

It's not our typical episode.

Listening to it can be rather dark and heavy, but it's well worth it.

I am so grateful for being able to provide a platform to allow these two exceptional people to share their story.

We here at Another Not Guilty do not believe in the death penalty,

and I hope those of you who listened to this episode share it with others.

Thank you.

I wanted nothing to do with it.

I spent the next couple days trying to find someone to tell me that it was okay to say no,

and finally I went to my husband, who actually was my fiancé at the time.

We got married 10 days after the shooting.

And I said to him, surely you don't want me to do this, right?

Like, I'm already on the road so much.

I had just gotten myself out of South Florida.

I'm going to be gone more.

I'm just going to go to trial.

I'm going to be on TV.

I'm going to hide my social media.

People could come after me.

They could come after you, and he stopped me.

And he said, babe, there's no choice here.

You have to do this.

He said, this keeps happening.

Children keep getting murdered in our schools,

and people are always talking about all the wrong shit.

And you have to go and do what you do best and find the problems and tell the story and do something to make it stop.

Welcome to Another Not Guilty.

I'm David Moore, here along with my fellow public defenders,

presenting to you the untold stories of the criminal justice system.

Objection.

That assumes there's justice in the system, which there ain't.

I prefer calling it the American criminal system.

These stories are about the not-guilty as public defenders get on a daily basis.

In an unjust criminal system.

With a deck stacked against us.

The not guilty.

Back, everybody.

Welcome back to Another Not Guilty.

It's your boy, Davey D, here, bringing you the freshest not-guilties across these United States of America.

Of course, happy to be presenting these stories with you, along with my badass fellow public defender, Lauren, here.

What's up, Lauren?

How are you doing today?

I'm doing good.

Yeah.

Excited to get into this one.

I know.

This is going to be a doozy.

Perhaps this is our 100th episode.

Maybe it is.

Or I'll just pretend like it will be.

All right.

This is our 100th episode.

Bringing it to you live.

It's not live, but bringing it to you now.

We have a really interesting case today.

We have Casey Sikor and Kate O'Shea.

Casey Sikor is the defense attorney or one of the defense attorneys that represented Nicholas Cruz, the sort of notorious, unfortunate Parkland shooter.

And we have Kate O'Shea, who was a mitigation specialist in the trial of Nicholas Cruz.

So this is a case I think we all have heard about, we all know about, and it's a big one.

I don't want to tell too many jokes because it is kind of, it's definitely a sad thing.

But I won't say, you know, all the cases are sad on some level.

So, but go ahead.

Let's introduce our guests.

We'll start off with Casey.

Casey, how are you doing here?

Yeah, my name is Casey Sikor.

I work for Suzerain Capital Defense based in South Carolina, which is a nonprofit representing indigent defendants at the state level facing the death penalty.

And I was, became part of the Cruz team in, I believe it was the summer of 2019.

I had originally reached out to the Cruz team for purposes of helping them prepare for jury selection in the case.

And I got to know the, the, the, the defense team.

And eventually they asked me to join as, as a member of the team.

And so I got involved, as I said, about August of 2019, about a year and a half after these horrific killings happened.

And, and through my work on the Cruz case, one of the very, one of the only things positive about working on the Cruz case is that it was my introduction to Kate O'Shea and the remarkable mitigation work that she has been doing in Florida for many years.

And she was a person that put together the facts and information about Nick's life that ultimately resulted in him getting sentenced to life imprisonment without parole instead of the death penalty.

And Casey, you said the Suzerain Capital, what was the organization again?

Suzerain Capital Defense, it's a nonprofit that I founded in 2016 with the purpose of assisting in capital cases, particularly in jurisdictions that are lacking appropriate resources and funding.

So we just do as much direct representation and training that we can with public defenders across the country handling capital cases.

And so that's what I've been doing since 2016.

And Kate has been working with me the last couple of years as we've been doing a lot of different trainings across the country about issues like fetal alcohol spectrum disorder and jury selection in capital cases.

All right, well, let's go ahead and introduce Kate then.

We have Kate O'Shea.

She is, O'Shea, excuse me, she is a mitigation specialist, the mitigation specialist on the Nicholas Cruz case.

Katie, go ahead, introduce yourself.

Say hi to the A&G universe.

Well, hi, I'm Kate O'Shea.

I'm a mitigation specialist.

I'm currently based in Florida.

I've been in practice for 15 years.

I started out doing mitigation in 2009, working for my mom, who was a lifelong public defender, who left the public defender's office and started doing capital mitigation in 2008.

And I followed her.

I spend about half my time working on my cases in my private practice and the other half of my time working with Casey and our other friend, Allison Miller and suzerain.

And I don't want to sound too corny, but certainly also for me, the only really positive thing that came out of the Cruz case was meeting Casey and joining suzerain and being able to use the skills that I have from the many cases that I've worked on to help other people help their clients.

So I'm grateful for suzerain and giving me the opportunity to make a bigger impact.

And so, Kate, can you tell the audience, what is a mitigation specialist?

Like, what exactly do you do on cases in general?

So it's kind of a fancier term for essentially a background investigator.

So it's my job when a person, when you look at a murder, there's always a question asked, how could a person do this?

And there's always an answer to that question.

And never in my experience has the answer been just because he woke up that day and wanted to be a murderer.

It's complex trauma.

It's mental illness.

It's drug abuse.

It's poverty.

It's all of those things.

And so my job is to get to know a person, the entire person, his or her background, his family life, identify what those issues are, bring in the appropriate experts,

and work with lay witnesses, lay experts, and expert witnesses to help the attorney in putting together what is the best possible penalty phase presentation.

The goal is always not to go to trial.

So we're always either trying to get the death penalty off the table before trial or resolve the case for whether it's life imprisonment of the possibility of parole or some number of years.

So there aren't really strict, well-defined guidelines out there for what a mitigation specialist does or is supposed to do,

other than our job is to assist the attorneys in putting on the best penalty phase presentation possible.

I think it's important for a mitigation specialist to be involved in every part of the trial.

I'm very involved in voir dire.

I participate to the extent that I can in the guilt innocence, or we call it the first phase of the trial.

And then I think that I sort of coordinate everything that is presented in the penalty phase.

Kate's experience exceeds that of almost everybody that practices capital defense as a lawyer.

I think that Kate's trial count now in capital cases is 17 or 18 that you've tried to take.

I mean, you know, you ask a very experienced capital defenders, very few have tried that many capital cases.

I know maybe two that have tried more than Kate, and they are, you know, people in their 60s.

So Kate's level of experience and expertise is literally unparalleled in this country.

Looks like you to get her for this case then.

So let's talk about, we're sort of like talking about this as if like everybody already knows what it is, but this is known as the Parkland shooting case.

Nicholas Cruz is the defendant.

And that's who your client was.

So Kate, can you talk about the Parkland shooting?

Like what were the facts of the case?

It was Valentine's Day 2018.

Nick was a former student at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.

He went to the school at, just before school was going to let out with his AR-15 rifle.

He entered the 1200 building, which is also referred to as the freshman building.

Loaded his rifle in the staircase and started shooting on the first floor.

Killed multiple people, students on the first floor in the classrooms and in hallways.

He went to all three floors of the school, did not kill anyone on the second floor because they were able to recognize the sound of the gunshots.

And so on the second floor, they went into their hard corners.

And so he walked through the halls when there was no one there to shoot.

Went onto the third floor where they thought there was a fire alarm.

So the school or the hallway was initially filled wall to wall with people.

At some point, they realized what was happening and as many children as possibly could crammed back into the classrooms.

But many of them were still stuck in the hallway and he killed more people on the third floor.

All in all, 14 students and three adults were killed.

Of the three adults that were killed, two of them were security monitors who were unarmed,

who ran towards the sound of gunshots to try to protect the children that were in the building.

And Nick shot both of them immediately upon them entering.

It was just the worst possible timing for the two of them when they entered the building.

And Nick immediately shot them.

The third teacher, the third adult that was on the third floor holding the door open,

trying to get his students into the classrooms.

And he was also shot and killed while trying to save his students.

This was a case that was national news.

I'm sure people will remember it.

So when you first realized you were going to be working on this case,

I mean, what were your thoughts about the intense media coverage?

So I knew that I was going to get the call from Melissa for a few days before it came.

When I first saw that the Broward Public Defender's Office had the case and was keeping the case,

I was immediately relieved because the Broward Public Defender,

somewhat famously in our community, does not work with outside mitigation specialists.

I thought, like, thank God I'm not going to get a phone call about this.

But then a guy named Terry Lenneman, who's a friend and mentor to both me and Melissa,

called me the next day and said Melissa had called him and had talked her boss into hiring

a mitigation specialist and had called looking for a recommendation.

And in fact, she had heard my mom's name.

And so she called Terry and said, I'm thinking about calling Cindy O'Shea.

Do you have her phone number?

And Terry said, listen, Cindy's great, but Kate is the person that you need for this case.

And I wanted nothing to do with it.

I really, I spent the next couple of days trying to find someone to tell me that it was okay to say no.

And finally, I went to my husband, who actually was my fiance at the time.

We got married 10 days after the shooting.

And I said to him, surely you don't want me to do this, right?

Like, I'm already on the road so much.

I had just gotten myself out of South Florida.

I'm going to be gone more.

I was going to go to trial.

I'm going to be on TV.

I'm going to hide my social media.

People could come after me.

They could come after you.

And he stopped me and he said, babe, there's no choice here.

You have to do this.

He said, this keeps happening.

Children keep getting murdered in our schools and people are always talking about all the wrong shit.

And you have to go and do what you do best and find the problems and tell the story and do something to make it stop.

And I really wanted to disagree with him, but I knew he was right.

Melissa called me that Saturday.

I was actually at my goddaughter's birthday party.

I missed her phone call because I was in a bounce house bouncing with a birthday girl.

And when I got out of the bounce house, I saw the missed call and I went outside.

And Melissa, ironically, was also sitting outside of a child's birthday party.

And we talked for a while and I said that I would take the case.

And I said, but I am getting married next Saturday.

So I could come meet him tomorrow or you can wait until I get back from the honeymoon.

And Melissa was kind enough to tell me to go ahead and enjoy my wedding and honeymoon.

And so I didn't actually officially sign a contract until I think it was the first week of March.

So like during your wedding, like during the vows, it's like you take him in sickness or in health or if she's representing.

She's completely unavailable because she's consumed in this case.

Is that I do?

I do.

Yeah.

The case did sort of affect a lot of milestones in my life.

It was definitely a cloud that was sort of hanging over my head and in the back of my mind very much when I was on my honeymoon.

It was a very scary thing when I came back and it was just sort of this reality, like everywhere you looked, there were, you know, MSD Strong hashtags and stickers and it was always on the news.

And I remember meeting him for the first time and I went to the jail.

I don't think Melissa was with me.

I think one of the other attorneys took me.

And I remember watching them escort him and they would like lock down the entire floor and it was a whole, whole big deal to move him.

And you could see through a window into the hallway when they were escorting him.

And I remember looking and there's three officers and a sergeant and they're all just towering over him.

And he's got his head down and he's shuffling.

And I remember thinking like that, like that's not him.

That can't be him.

But you couldn't possibly mistake his hair and his ears.

It was definitely him, but he just was, he was so small.

And so frail that it just was shocking to me that someone who was so slight in stature and such a little wisp of a person could have done the amount of damage that he did.

And that's just the reality of AR-15 rifles.

And that was, that was the first time you met him.

Uh, how was that like two weeks after the shooting or three weeks after the shooting, you met him?

Two or three weeks after, yeah.

Okay.

Can you, can you tell us about your interaction with him?

Did you like, what type of your, what type of conversation you had?

Or what's your goal?

Were you with an attorney when you met him?

Were you by yourself?

I think I was with an attorney and for a long time, it was, it was very difficult to talk to Nick.

I mean, you couldn't even get a full sentence out of that.

And he always, I mean, to this day, and I think for as long as he's been alive, he wants so badly to be liked and to be accepted that you can't even tell if the words that he's saying are true or what they're thinking, what he's thinking, or if it's just that he's trying to answer.

Like he's just trying to give you whatever the right answer is.

Even when there is no right answer, you're just asking him a question about his life.

And he just wants to do and say whatever he thinks he's supposed to.

And he's usually wrong about what he thinks he's supposed to say.

So, yeah.

So, Kate, what was your goals in the first meeting with Nicholas then?

Or with your, with your, with all your interviews with Nicholas?

What are you trying to do as a mitigation specialist?

It depends on the client.

A lot of it is, especially in the beginning, it's rapport building.

I don't do a lot of structured interviewing with my clients.

I usually have one meeting early where it's like, you know, who's your mom?

Who are you in touch with?

What are the phone numbers that you have?

Where'd you go to school?

Have them sign releases.

But other than that, I sometimes will go in with a particular thing that I want to talk about.

But a lot of it is just sort of assessing, like, where is he today?

And what I usually am trying to do with my clients is help them to understand that they are who they are because of things that happen to them and things that are beyond their control.

And I'm not trying to teach them to excuse their actions, but I'm trying to help them to understand themselves, to help me understand them better.

So I don't ever sit down with a client and say things like, have you ever been sexually abused?

I try to get my clients to a place where they appreciate that they are who they are because of things that they've been through.

So that they eventually start to grasp why they are where they are.

And then they eventually want to talk to me about those things.

Nick just doesn't have that kind of depth.

Nick is just like a bottomless pit for attention and affection and friendship and love.

And he just doesn't, it doesn't matter how much of those things he's getting, he doesn't understand them.

So Nick was not a very liable historian.

He would sit for some times and once he started talking, he would talk and tell us,

stories that were outrageous and I would try to follow up on them.

And most of what he would say turned out not to be true.

You know, once in a while there were, there were things that I could follow up on,

but with Nick, it was really just a lot of just sort of listening to him.

And it was more management, I think, than it was anything else with him.

Part of your job then you met with his family?

What family he had?

Yeah, there wasn't, there was his brother.

I spent a lot of time with his birth mother who he'd never met.

His adoptive parents were both deceased and the other family that he had were distant and out of state and not in touch with him.

And how close to the incident did you start meeting with his family?

I mean, was this really fresh for them too?

Yeah. And so his brother, especially, was really the only family that he had.

And he was around the rest of the team a lot, even during those first three weeks when I was getting married and on my honeymoon.

So by the time I started, he had a relationship with other people on the team.

And there was a little bit of adjustment for Melisa and for the other lawyers on the team, just because they had never worked with a mitigation specialist before.

So they didn't really understand what my role was.

I remember early on, Melisa being surprised to learn that I should be invited to team meetings.

And that's not a comment on Melisa.

It's just that their office had never had a mitigation specialist before, so they had no idea what I was supposed to be doing.

And in time, I ended up taking over and becoming the point person on a relationship with Nick's brother.

But he was absolutely in shock.

I mean, you know, his mother had only been dead a few months also, and it completely ruined his life.

Had Nick been living with him at the time of the shooting?

Or was Nick living by himself?

No. So when their mother died, they were living in a townhome, and they were essentially homeless.

There was a friend of their mother's who took them in, and they were living in a trailer with her, her adult son, her four-year-old son, and her mother.

It was not a good situation.

There was a lot of people in a trailer.

Yeah. And there was a lot of history between Nick and the son.

The son had sexually abused Nick when he was a child, so there was a lot of tension there.

It was an explosive situation.

It went sour within a month.

Things went really bad on the day of his adopted mother, Linda's funeral.

There was a fight, and the police were called, and he was told that he had to leave.

So he wound up with a family.

There was a family that he knew, the son from JROTC.

And it ended up being sort of a strange situation, but it was just really this poor kid was trying to be nice to the weird kid from school that nobody liked.

And Nick lived with him for a few months, and things obviously were not good for Nick.

And then this happened.

How old was your client, Nick, at the time of the shooting?

19.

And his adopted mother, the woman who raised him, had died about eight months before?

Three months before.

She died November 1st.

And his adopted dad was already passed?

Yeah, so his adopted dad died just before Nick's sixth birthday.

Nick was in the den playing with his father, Roger.

The story goes that Linda, the mom, was in the kitchen, and Nick came running out of the room crying.

And Linda said, what's the matter, Nicky?

Did Daddy punish you again?

And he said, Daddy's dead.

And ran into his room.

And Roger had been playing with Nick and had a massive heart attack and died.

In front of Nick?

In front of Nick, yeah.

Okay, so basically your client, at the time of the shooting, had lost kind of everything.

His dad died a long time before.

His mother had died just three months before.

And then they had subsequently, him and his brother, had kind of become homeless.

And at that point, he'd stayed in the trailer for about a month with a man who had used him sexually as a child.

And then left there to go stay with an old friend that he had stayed with when he was in J.R.R.T.C.

He had never stayed with the friend.

He went from the trailer to another friend's house.

He was there for one or two nights.

And then this family offered to take him in.

Okay, and that's where he was staying at the time of the shooting.

Correct.

I'm sorry, when he went to go live in the trailer, was he with a man that previously sexually abused him or was he sexually abused while in the trailer?

It happened when he was a child.

He was about, I think we figured out, between eight and ten years old.

Okay, who was this man to him then?

So she was the mom and was a neighbor and she had befriended Linda.

Linda became very isolated over the years as the boys' behavior got worse and worse.

And Linda, by all accounts, when Roger died, Linda basically died also.

So she just had these two boys that she had no ability to control and she was completely in over her head.

And she was 49 when Nick was born.

So she was, you know, in her 50s, into her 60s, chasing toddlers around, dealing with difficult teenagers.

And she had really nobody left except for her neighbor, Roxanne.

And I guess she just was willing to forget about what had happened when they were kids.

I mean, she knew about it.

She just didn't have anybody else.

And then Nicholas went to go live with him again or live with him later on?

Well, after Linda died, I mean, there was no one else to take them.

But Linda had an incredible ability and an incredible drive to put on airs and hide what was going on behind a facade.

At some point, though, Casey ends up on the case, right?

Like, Casey, how did you end up on the case?

This is a Broward County Public Defender case that's decided to keep the case.

Kate's on it somehow.

How did you get involved, Casey?

I had a friend named Allison Miller, who was a Capitol defender in Florida at the time, and she knew the Cruz defense team.

And so Allison and I were just talking about ways in which I might be able to help them prepare for trial.

And initially, as I said, it was just supposed to be me helping them prepare for jury selection.

And that's what my original offer was when I met with Melissa in, I think it was in the spring, summer of 2019.

And so I joined the team basically as, I guess you would say, sort of a consulting lawyer or a resource lawyer, just to bring whatever I could to the team.

And I eventually developed a good working relationship with Melissa and Kate and other members of the defense team.

And Melissa ultimately asked me to join the team full time, which I did.

And so I was on the case officially from, I believe, August of 2019 through the conclusion of the trial.

And at the time that you joined the case, when you said you joined initially to help with jury selection, this was still an open case.

So you were thinking you were going to help with jury selection for the guilt and innocence phase of the case.

Yes.

Yeah.

I mean, it took a long time.

I'd say approximately three years for us to decide how to how to deal with the first phase of trial.

There's conventional wisdom in the capital defense community that you never plead guilty.

And no one's ever been able to describe to me the basis of that conventional wisdom.

I believe it's probably because, and I think that this is correct, in a capital case, you have to make sure that you preserve as many issues as you possibly can.

And if you plead guilty at the first phase, you don't have a first phase case, you just have a penalty phase, then you have waived all issues that may have come up during the first phase.

And so they will no longer be available to you on appeal in the event that you get sentenced to death.

And so in Nick's case, we worked for approximately three years, trying very hard to develop a first phase defense.

The problem with Florida law is, is that it specifically does not allow a diminished capacity defense.

So you either have to have a typical standard defense that you would have to a murder charge, like, you know, it wasn't me or it was self-defense or it was manslaughter, or you have to be not guilty by reason of insanity.

You cannot present a defense in Florida that says, I did this, by all accounts, it appears as though it's a murder.

But because of my psychological deficits, I do not have the ability to manifest mens rea in the way that a normally healthy person can.

And so therefore, I'm not really guilty in the way that a normally healthy person would be.

You are not allowed to do that in Florida.

You are allowed to do that in a lot of states, but Florida is a shithole.

And so given that you're not allowed to present that kind of defense in Florida, we didn't really have a choice because Nick was not legally insane and he was guilty as shit.

I think we should first explain to the listeners, this is different than the cases we normally talk about because normally we don't talk about the punishment, but in a capital case, there's actually two trials, or there can be.

So the first phase that we're talking about is where the, it's the same kind of trial we always talk about where the jury is going to decide if your client is guilty or not.

And then in a capital case, there's a trial after that, if your client's found guilty, where they decide if he should, in fact, be put to death.

And so I just want that to be clear when we're talking about first phase or second phase.

That's exactly right.

And it's, it's, it's, it's divided.

The two trials are, they're both full and complete trials, right?

The first phase, like you said, it's guilt or innocence.

You have opening statements by both sides.

You have the presentation of evidence and testimony, closing arguments, deliberation.

If they, if the jury finds the person not guilty, obviously the case is over.

If the person in Florida is convicted of first degree murder, you proceed, you proceed to the second phase and you have a whole nother trial.

Opening statements, presentation of evidence, testimony, closing arguments, deliberations.

Same jury though, right?

Same jury.

And the, what's, what needs to be proven at the penalty phase by the prosecution is what called, is what are called aggravating factors.

And if they are able to prove at least one aggravating factor, that is what places the death penalty on the table for the jury as a possibility.

It in no way means that if the jury finds that the state has proven an aggravating factor, that that means the person gets the death penalty.

It just means that that's what triggers the death penalty is now on the table.

And then the defense presents what's called mitigating circumstances, which is any information about the defendant's character or background or the circumstances of the offense that any one juror believes is worthy of a sentence of life without the possibility of parole.

And the jury has to weigh those aggravating factors and mitigating circumstances.

And then each juror on their own, after doing that weighing process, they base their ultimate decision on their own individual moral assessment of the case.

They don't, they can deliberate all they want, but when it comes time to whether or not you vote life or death, you have, as a juror, you have to turn inward and consult your own morality.

And it's a very difficult thing that jurors are asked to do, and it's, it is counterintuitive.

Jurors think, well, clearly, if you're going to be, you ask me to make this monumentally grave decision, there is going to be a flow chart to ensure that I arrive at the appropriate decision.

And when they learn that it couldn't be any further from the truth, a lot of them are very, are very uncomfortable with that because they're saying, you're telling me I have to listen to all of this.

And when it comes time to decide whether or not another human being lives or dies, you want me to just turn inward and consult my own moral compass to decide whether or not this person deserves to live or die?

And the answer is yes.

Casey, let me ask you this question.

So it's first degree murder in Florida.

If someone's convicted of first degree murder, does that automatically trigger capital punishment or is there something more?

What type of murder are we talking?

What types of murders need to occur for it to be a capital case in Florida?

Well, the truth is that it's almost impossible to not have a first degree murder that doesn't qualify as potentially a capital first degree murder.

First degree murder is just the intentional premeditated killing of an innocent person.

No excuse, justification or defense.

That will get you life without the possibility of parole every single time.

However, if the state also alleges and proves an aggravating factor, that is what triggers the possibility of the death penalty.

Casey, you've talked about the factors in aggravation that the that the prosecution needs to prove just one.

And that's enough for by law for the jurors to vote death.

And as a defense, you it's you present factors in mitigation, right?

Let's talk and like what like without getting the specifics of Nicholas's case, like what are the factors in mitigation that jurors are supposed to consider?

Because this is where they do that weighing of aggravation, things that are really bad about Nicholas versus mitigation, things that are like the jurors should consider about his life that would maybe say, hey, you know what?

Maybe I have an understanding.

I feel sorry for him.

Maybe.

So I guess I won't vote for death.

I'll just vote for life without the possibility of parole.

So what are like what like what are these mitigation factors you consider?

There is a statute in Florida that lists statutory mitigating circumstances.

And then the last one in that list essentially says or anything else that a jury finds to be worthy of a sentence of life without the possibility of parole.

It's what we call sort of the catch all category of mitigation.

But the statutory mitigators are things like the defendant's age.

And so in Nicholas's case, he was 19 years old.

Had he been, you know, a year and a half younger, he wouldn't have been eligible for capital punishment.

And so that was a mitigator that was important to us.

He was still young from the medical community's perspective.

He's not somebody whose brain is fully developed because the medical community now is pretty much in consensus that it takes up to the age 25 for a person's brain to be fully myelinated and therefore fully mature.

And we know that a person who's 19 years old certainly is not has not reached full maturity, certainly not somebody like Nicholas Cruz, whose brain was damaged.

Also, he was going to be lagging behind no matter what age he was.

But so there are, again, numerous statutory mitigating circumstances, things like age or the defendant was under extreme emotional distress at the time of the killings.

Or another one is that the defendant played a relatively minor role in the murders, which would be, you know, in the event that, you know, say you were the getaway driver in a robbery where somebody got killed and you didn't actually kill somebody.

You might be guilty of felony murder, but your role was relatively minor as compared to other people, other co-defendants.

And so those are the types of things that are generally listed in the statutory mitigators under Florida law.

But virtually all state legislatures in this country allow for what I said is called the catch-all category of mitigation, which is anything else that the defense offers the jury as to weigh in favor of a sentence of life without parole.

Well, and it can be literally anything, and an example that I give to people, it seems sort of silly, but I think it makes the point, is that if I were guilty of murder, and I'm a 45-year-old man, and I was being tried for murder and was facing the death penalty, in mitigation during the penalty phase, somebody could bring in a neighbor that was my neighbor when I was a kid growing up.

And I used to cut their lawn, and they could come in and take the stand and say, when Casey was a young kid, he used to come over and cut the grass at my house just because he was a nice kid.

And some people would be like, well, what does that have to do with punishment?

And say, well, it just depends on whether or not a juror thinks that's important, because I think a lot of jurors are like, if this person just looks like a monster, I'm giving them a death penalty.

But if you can show me that at least at some point, they were a human being, a kind person, I might consider life without the possibility of parole.

So a lot of the things that we present are just windows into who this person was before they became a murderer.

Because being a murderer defines you a lot for the rest of your life, but it's still not the entire picture.

You're trying to paint the whole picture of the whole person and saying they're more than just this act.

And that's where Kate's work is super important.

Yeah, so let's touch on something David said.

We specifically do not ask our jurors to feel sorry for our clients.

Nick is perhaps the most pathetic shadow of a human being that I've ever encountered.

And there are days that I do feel sorry for him.

And I think some of our jurors felt sorry for him, but that is not why people vote for life.

Our job is to humanize our clients.

Our job is to explain their behaviors.

But we certainly, if we're going to feel sorry for someone in the courtroom,

we feel sorry for the people who had a loved one murdered.

So it's sort of, at first glance, it might seem like we're trying to garner sympathy.

But sympathy is not something that we would ever ask someone to have and to use as a reason to vote for life.

Let's talk about the mitigation for Nicholas, okay?

Because we just talked about aggravation, what that is, the many aggravating factors in Nicholas's case.

Let's talk about the many mitigation factors that you uncovered, that you investigated, that you did in the presentation of Nicholas's defense.

Yeah, the root to the whole thing was Nick's biological mother, Brenda.

And I think it's important that Kate described to your listeners the relationship that she developed with Brenda and the history that she learned from Brenda.

Because without that relationship that Kate developed with Brenda, the truth would have been lost not only to us, but also to the jury.

And Brenda's the mother, the bio-mother?

Biological.

Bio-mother.

Okay, yeah.

And how'd you get in touch with the bio-mother, Kate?

We were able to obtain Nick's adoption records pretty early in the case.

And there were, if I'm remembering correctly, about 1,500 pages of adoption records.

Brenda, his biological mother, had reached out to the attorney that did the adoption when she was only a couple of months along.

So there was intake paperwork.

She was connected with Linda and Roger almost immediately.

So there was a lot of, there was a ledger with all of the money that they were giving her.

There were receipts for the things that she was buying, for some of the things she was buying with the money.

We learned from the adoption records and from Brenda's criminal history that she was arrested at six months pregnant for possession of crack.

She spent a couple of days in jail and was released on bond because Linda and Roger bonded her out.

She was out from, I want to say, the middle of June until sometime in August when she failed a drug test and was court-ordered because she was on conditional release into a rehab facility where she remained until Nick was born.

When I went to meet Brenda for the first time, I assumed that she knew.

I assumed that she would just be sitting there waiting for someone to come and talk to her because, of course, Nick was all over the news.

Brenda was, I'm sorry, Linda was all over the news.

It was known somehow that he was adopted.

And in the records, there was some communication between Linda and Brenda after the boys were born.

It was one of the conditions that Brenda wanted to have some updates.

So there had been some letters back and forth.

Linda had sent Brenda some pictures of the boys when they were very young, when Brenda was still in prison.

So I assumed that she knew.

But she never knew Nick and Rogers.

She never knew their last name.

So the name Nicholas Cruise meant nothing to her.

And I remember I went to her house.

She was living in Section 8 housing.

She was sitting outside.

And I recognized her right away from one of her mugshots.

She was a...

You couldn't miss Brenda.

She still had a mullet.

She's, you know, she was a...

She was a larger-than-life woman.

She rode a moped.

She had a Cadillac that was always broken.

She had to, like, lean way back in the Cadillac seat because somehow she had gotten a quarter stuck in the track.

So it was just constantly falling apart and having problems.

But she loved this Cadillac.

So I walked up to her and I said, I'm with the public defender's office.

I'm here to talk about Nick.

And she immediately starts talking about someone having a heart attack and the cops coming.

And I stopped her.

And I later learned that her neighbor's name was Nick.

And he had either had a heart attack or overdosed.

And the cops had come.

And I said, no, Brenda, I'm here to talk about your son, Nick, Nicholas Cruz.

And she said, my Nicky, what did he...

What happened?

What's wrong?

And I had to tell her, you know, that she went and walked up at the school recently.

That was him.

And she just started just wailing.

I mean, it was just...

Her heart just immediately broke.

And as soon as she caught her breath, she said, what do you need?

What can I do?

I'll do anything to help him.

And that was the beginning of our relationship.

Brenda was very open with me about her life, which was traumatic and tragic.

She had mentally ill, substance-abusing parents.

She was repeatedly sexually assaulted by her father when she was very young.

She was in the streets when she was a teenager.

She was arrested in the cocaine cowboys.

She was indicted with them when she was, I think, 17 and did time in federal prison.

And she talked about being homeless, being a prostitute, boosting.

She would steal food from the grocery store or steal things from the clothing stores and then

either sell them on the street or trade them to the drug man for crack.

She had been sober for, I think, about 15 years by the time I met her.

But she talked to me a lot about her drug use.

And when we first got the case, we were initially looking at autism because in the thousands of

pages of school records and other records that we were able to get, a lot of them were, he

was always being referred for autism diagnosis and autism would come up.

And then at some point in his high school years, it just started saying he's autistic.

So we, for years, thought there was just like some autism diagnosis and evaluation out there.

And we would just blindly send release forums to anywhere that we could think of that might

have done the evaluation and we never found one.

What we later learned was that there never was an evaluation or a diagnosis.

At some point, Linda just decided that she liked the idea of having an autistic son.

So she started telling people that he was autistic.

But when you talk to Nick, it doesn't seem autistic.

He, he can look you in the eye.

He can have a conversation.

It's not, it's not a logical conversation, but he's, he's capable of interaction.

So it never really felt right.

And we brought in a doctor who did an evaluation and said the same thing.

He was like, listen, I can check enough boxes.

I can give you an autism diagnosis, but you're going to get a lot of pushback because the

kid has these sort of superficial social skills.

When Casey came on the case, I don't, I don't remember exactly how the conversation shifted,

but Casey had previously done a case with a client that had FASD and he had worked with

a team of experts.

Fetal, fetal alcohol syndrome.

Fetal alcohol syndrome.

FASD.

Spectrum disorder.

Okay.

Spectrum disorder is an umbrella term.

Fetal alcohol syndrome is one of the diagnoses that exists under that umbrella.

Okay.

At full, so they call it fetal alcohol syndrome is a person who has recognizable facial features

and that's sort of classic what people think of when they hear about fetal alcohol.

Only, I think Casey will correct me on the statistic if I'm wrong, only around 10% of people

with FASDs actually meet the criteria for fetal alcohol syndrome.

Nick meets, Nick had some of, but not all of the facial features.

He suffers from alcohol related neurodevelopmental disorder, which is a medical diagnosis and neurodevelopmental

disorder associated with prenatal alcohol exposure, which is a psychological diagnosis.

So those are the two that he fits that are underneath that umbrella.

Correct me if I'm wrong too.

It seems that he wasn't properly diagnosed until this case, right?

I mean, they were sort of identifying deficits or issues, but never getting the whole picture

and coming up with a specific diagnosis that could have a specific plan.

Is that accurate?

Yeah.

Yeah.

And that's the biggest problem is that what Nick, the biggest problem with Nick was not

that he had fetal alcohol spectrum disorder.

It was that he had undiagnosed fetal alcohol spectrum disorder.

That was the problem.

Because a person with fetal alcohol spectrum disorder needs very specific interventions and he never

got them.

And the reason he never got them is that his adoptive mother, Linda, was desperate for the

world to believe that she had a perfect, lovely family.

She told friends and strangers that Nick was her biological child, which was a lie.

And there were people when Nick was less than two years old, I believe it was, it was a daycare

worker, I think, who initially suggested to Linda her suspicion that perhaps Nick had been exposed

to drugs or alcohol in utero because the way he was acting.

And Linda said, yeah.

And Linda said, well, that's not possible because he's my child and he wasn't exposed to anything

in utero because she was so desperate for the world to believe that she had a perfect family

because she had wanted children her entire life and had never been able to have them.

And when she adopted these two boys, she was dead set on making everybody believe that this

was the fairy tale that she had always wanted to come true.

And so people were repeatedly coming to her and saying, are you sure?

Are you positive?

And eventually with some practitioners, she would admit that he was adopted, but she would

say, no, there wasn't any problem with birth.

There wasn't any problem with drugs or alcohol in utero, which she knew to be alive because

she visited Brenda at the rehab facility when Brenda was pregnant with Nick.

And there's only one reason why people are in rehab facilities.

Yeah.

She went as far as telling people when she would finally admit that he was adopted, she would

say the birth mother was in a group home and being drug tested throughout the pregnancy.

So I know that there was no substance exposure.

How did you find this out about Linda?

Who was the storyteller for Linda?

And like, in terms of her wanting a perfect life and like, how did you get that history?

There were a number of informants about Linda.

And it was also very clear in the records.

We had, because Nick is so young and he had so many services and the records all still were

held digitally.

We had tens of thousands of pages of records about Nick and about Linda, that there were

neighbors, there were teachers, there were counselors, there were friends.

Linda would spend 90% of her life on the phone.

So she had two very close, she had a very close friend who she'd known since she was a child.

And she had a cousin in Long Island, both of whom I spent a lot of time with.

And it took a little bit of time, but eventually they were both in a place where they could be

really honest with us about Linda.

And they were, you know, they both had a lot of anger at Linda for the way that she

mishandled the boys.

So they were, they were able to tell me all of her life story from the time she was very

young.

And Linda had her own problems when she was three years old.

Her mother abandoned her, left her and her infant brother at a neighbor's house, left the

brother just in the drawer, in a drawer of a dresser with a note that said, I don't want

to do this anymore.

She was raised, and then her father just went to the city and went to work and she was raised

by Yugoslavian grandparents who were obviously wonderful providers and they were loving, but

it was not an affectionate household.

And I think even then she started trying to put up this facade.

She had some neighbors who she babysat their kids and she sort of just made them herself

part of their family.

She would tell people that they were her parents.

She would tell people that the older child was her sister.

So she's, she had been trying to put on this, this facade from the time she was maybe 10

or 11 years old.

I just feel like that's just, you know, just so much human suffering and pain, emotional

pain, just when people, you know, are just trying to take life and fit it into this box

and tell a story of a, I mean, it just, it just resonates so with so many people.

And so then I think as Casey was saying, Kate, you developed a relationship with Brenda's

friend.

We found Carolyn from the police report because she was arrested with Brenda when Brenda was

six months pregnant.

And the first time I called Carolyn, I remember that it was 2020 right before COVID started and

I was supposed to go meet her in Louisville on March 17th, 2020.

I talked to her on the phone and of course she hadn't thought about Brenda in years, had

no idea about Nick.

And she was like, it's kind of, yeah, I remember Brenda.

She was a little, I was more of a drinker than she was, you know, we were kind of partying

together and it was, it was not nearly as intense as when I met her in person.

I ended up not going on that day because I was like, let me see what this COVID thing is.

Maybe I'll just come up in a couple of months.

And of course a year and a half went by and Melissa and I ended up going together and Carolyn

came and met us in the lobby of our hotel.

And after I think talking to us and really understanding who we were, that we were genuinely

interested in her story and that what we were trying to do and the story that we were trying

to tell a lie, she just absolutely spilled her guts.

Now, Carolyn, after that arrest, went to prison and got sober, never went back to Broward

County, never did drugs again.

So it was an incredibly painful set of memories for her to talk to us about.

But she understood the importance of us knowing what was going on with Brenda during that time.

She talked about being, they were prostitutes together, that they would smoke crack for days

at a time until they were hallucinating and they would sort of make each other go to sleep.

And they were sleeping on a mattress and it came from a dumpster in the apartment that Linda

and Roger were paying for where Brenda was living.

And she described that Brenda would drink Cult 45, which is a malt liquor, which has more alcohol

than beer. And she would put it in one of those big 7-Eleven mega gold cups that people used

to love in the nineties. And she would put two of them in there at once and walk around and empty

it and then go back to the apartment and get a refill. We bonded because I was so awed by her,

her willingness to come back and put herself and put on the line. When it came time to have a

conversation about testifying, as you can imagine, getting people to testify in this case was

incredibly difficult. But I didn't even have to ask Carolyn. She said, "Listen, I want to come and tell

my story because I believe that it's important for me to talk about what happened to me because if my

story motivates one woman to put down the pipe, to put down the bottle, to go to rehab, then it will be

worth whatever comes my way for seeming like I'm advocating for Nicholas Cruz." She was the first witness

that we called at trial. I don't know what the jurors were expecting when we started our case, but it definitely

wasn't Carolyn Deakins. And she got on the stand and there was a moment where she was talking about

how she and Brenda were acting. And she looked over at Nick and she just said, "I'm sorry, Nick,

but that's how it was." And I just thought it was one of the most humanizing things anyone did for Nick

throughout the trial. And I know that her testimony was impactful with the jurors.

So she, she said that during the trial, like when talking about like the partying that was going

on while Brenda was pregnant with Nick. Smoking crack and drinking. Yeah.

Yeah. I think that the, I think the actual quote that she apologized to Nick for in front of the jury

in open court was that she at one point confronted Brenda about being pregnant and doing drugs and

drinking because even Carolyn, who was a homeless prostitute thought to herself that can't be good

for that baby. And she confronted Brenda about it. And Brenda said to her, "Don't worry about it.

This baby's already bought and paid for." Because she had already signed a contract with Linda and

Roger the adoptive parents to adopt Nick as soon as he was born. And so that was the comment that

Carolyn apologized to Nick in front of the jury about. And it's, it makes it seem like Brenda was a

real piece of shit when you hear that she said that, because I believe that she said that to Carolyn.

But I do think it's important, particularly when we're doing this type of work that we,

that we always examine what's going on with people. Brenda saying that,

"Don't worry about it. This baby's bought and paid for." That was the addiction talk.

Yeah.

That was Brenda's addiction talking. Brenda, she loved Nick. She loved Nick's brother. She loved

various people, but she was a horribly damaged, traumatized human being who had, whose brain had

been hijacked by crack addiction and alcoholism. But she loved those boys. The second time that I met

Brenda, Melissa and I went to see her together, we went in her apartment. And Brenda had in a frame,

a picture that Linda had sent to her of Nicholas and Zachary when they were babies. She was in prison

when she got the picture. And it's really remarkable when you realize that this woman, over the years

between receiving this picture and showing it to me, she was homeless multiple times. She moved

countless times. She had lived in her car countless times, but she had held onto this picture and had

it in her and it was folded up and faded, but it was in a frame and it was something that was so,

so important to her. And she told them when they adopted the boys, if they ever need anything,

if they need a kidney, you call me and I'll, and I'll come running. And when the time came,

she did come through for Nick with everything that she had.

There's a lot going on. And then I think we talked about how Nick, Nick isn't, Nicholas isn't really

in a position to talk or talk about what he's experiencing. If he's having a problem, he's

unable to, to, to verbalize it. And then Linda doesn't want to acknowledge that because she's trying to

portray a perfect life. And then, which led to Nick being sexually abused, right? And he's not able to

share that he's being abused or tell people that. What, what other, uh, mitigation did you guys come

across for Nicholas?

Something that was a really crucial part of the story is what we might sort of describe as the

category of system failures. There are, or were a great number of people who by no means are at fault

for what happened on February 14th, 2018. And by no stretch of the imagination, am I trying to point

fingers at anybody other than Nick, cause it is solely Nick's fault. But there are people who to say

the very least dropped the ball. And the prosecution knew very much that the best argument for us to make

on behalf of a life sentence for Nick was to say that there are a lot of people who fail because they

knew that there were. And because that they knew that that was the best argument to make for us to make

to the jury, they filed a motion before the trial, asking the judge to prohibit us from making that

argument. And they cited a case that in no way, shape or form stood for that proposition, but they stood in

court and just said over and over again, this case says you're not allowed to present systemic failures

or evidence of third party guilt in a capital case. And it's bullshit. The case doesn't even come close

to saying that, but because the judge wanted Nick to die more than anybody in the entire world. And

because she used to work in that state attorney's office, she granted that motion without any legal

grounds whatsoever. And so we were prohibited from making the argument, but she couldn't prohibit us

from presenting the information in the hopes that jurors would connect the dots themselves. And so

there were countless systemic failures, um, not only within the school system or the mental health

system, but also the federal Bureau of investigation and the Broward county sheriff's office and various

other entities. And just as an example of the magnitude of these failures within approximately a year of the

the murders, two different people called the FBI to report Nick as a likely school or mass shooter. One of

whom called because Nick posted on YouTube, I'm going to be the next school shooter. And then the other person who

called was a long-term family friend of Nick's and called the FBI and said, this is where he is. His mother just

died. He has guns and knives. He's obsessed with violence and quote, I'm afraid he's going to do a

column by and the FBI in response to those two calls, the FBI's internal system flagged those two calls as

being about the same person or at least being about the person with the exact same name. And the FBI did

Jack fucking shit in response to those two warnings.

So at this point we have the fetal alcohol spectrum disorder. We have, um,

sexual abuse. And then we have these sort of systemic failures as pieces of mitigating information.

Yeah. And another big, another big system failure is that when Nick was at that school that Kate was describing

earlier for kids with emotional and behavioral problems, they eventually got Nick to a point

where they thought that he could be mainstreamed. At least some people thought that they could be

mainstream. He could be mainstreamed. But when he was referred to go back to Marjory Stoneman Douglas,

it was with a specific recommendation of a counselor at the school that Nick not be allowed to participate

in JROTC because of his obsession with guns and violence. So this, this counselor at the school

said, I'm reluctant for him to go back to Marjory Stoneman Douglas, but if he does,

for the love of God, do not let him get into JROTC. Which we know he got the, when he was,

he initially was partially mainstreamed to do two classes a day at Marjory Stoneman Douglas,

one of which was JROTC, where he learned to handle guns. And the JROTC program at that school at that

time was made possible by a grant from the NRA.

How old is he?

16 or 17.

And there's a professional who says, okay, you know, if, I don't think he should go back to the

school, but if he does go, don't let him do JROTC because he has an obsession with violence and guns.

Now, what did this obsession, where did this obsession manifest previously? And in what way?

In his school work, I mean, he used to, when he was in school and couldn't understand his work,

he would draw violent images on his classwork, on his homework, he would draw swastikas, he would draw

people shooting other people, he would make verbal threats. There was a teacher at the middle school

that he attended that used to have to call regularly the security personnel in the school to come because

Nick was so outrageous. And eventually she became so fearful of Nick and his response when she called

security that she developed a secret message to give to another student that would tell that student to

pretend they needed to go to the bathroom and go out in the hallway and get the teacher next door to call

security so that Nick wouldn't become violent when he saw his own teacher call security.

And then he also was very violent in his home. He, the mansion, the 4,000 square foot mansion that they

lived in in Parkland, Florida, the walls inside the home were covered with holes that Nick had punched

through the drywall. He used to sit on the toilet in his bathroom with a knife and stab the wall in front

of the toilet. He used to attack furniture with a knife. He used to cut the rugs up in the home.

And there was a case manager from a behavioral health organization in Broward County that used

to do home visits. And a lot of this evidence of violence was uncovered by these case agents who would

see this destruction inside the home that usually was connected to Nick losing at a video game and

would, would be, would come completely unglued.

And in no way do I want this to be perceived as me suggesting that violent video games are to blame

here. That is not what I'm saying. But Nick has FASD and FASD does have autistic traits. And one of those

traits with Nick is that he fixates on things. For him, it started with video games that he was playing with,

the neighbor who was also sexually abusing him. And he was having to perform sexual favors in exchange for

being allowed to play video games. So he became obsessed with video games. Then it progressed into

violent first shooter games, first person shooter games. From there, he became obsessed with airsoft

guns. And from there, he became obsessed with the military and real guns. So it wasn't that violent video

games were to blame. But that was where the progression started when he was a very young

child. And he became, he just was always obsessed with guns, violence, violent video games. And he had

such a low frustration tolerance that when he was losing at the games and he was not very good at them,

that he was constantly breaking the remote, breaking the TV, breaking his game system,

punching holes in walls. That was where most of his frustration would come from.

It sounds like in addition to uncovering the FASD and the sort of history of trauma that Nick experienced,

and also lack of appropriate intervention and services, it sounds like you guys also uncovered

basically every red flag there could be that other people noticed, including Nick himself,

making a YouTube video saying he was going to end up being the next shooter. But that there were

plenty of adults, certainly, I would venture to say his mother, there were teachers, and all the way up

to the FBI, who had information and had witnessed things that we would easily call a red flag.

And to your point about red flags, Lauren, Casey and I would routinely move into and just sort of take

over different empty offices within the Broward public defender's office. We just had, there was just so

much stuff and so many files. And Casey and I, Casey wanted some help sort of getting a solid handle

on Nick's life story. So we had some of those giant easel size post-its and Casey's, we said, okay,

we're going to do one post-it for every two to three years. And we'll just put like just the biggest

problematic events from his life. And pretty quickly we had filled the entire, we wallpapered the entire

room. It looked like just the scribblings of a madman, but it was, it was all Nick's life story.

And we would actually take a red marker and draw red flags on the really intense ones. And it was like,

when you stood in that room and you could turn around in a circle and see just how many times

this should have been stopped, that his life should have gone differently. And it really,

when you put it on paper like that and you sit there in the room surrounded by it, you really

understand the magnitude of, of how many dominoes fell and exactly the right way for this to be allowed

to happen. Was Nick ever after being adopted by Linda, was he ever in the dependency system? Did you

have to get DCFS records or? Yeah. The Department of Children and Families is what we have here in Florida.

They were only really involved one time. So right around Nick's 18th birthday, he told a peer that he

either drank gasoline or was going to drink gasoline and he had been cutting and his arms were,

were all kinds of scraped up. He was always wearing sort of tattered clothes, but he would wear long

sleeves because his arms were always just full of cuts. The, the student reported it to a teacher who

went to a social worker. The social worker evaluated Nick and desperately wanted to Baker Act and Baker Act

is in, I don't know if it's everywhere in Florida, it's up to 72 hour in psychiatric involuntary

hospitalization. For some reason, in Broward County, the school board rule is that the only person who

was allowed to Baker Act on school grounds is the school resource officer. Even though the social

workers are licensed social workers and anywhere else they could have Baker Acted Nick, for whatever

reason, there is no authority for them, according to the school board, to Baker Act him on school grounds.

The school resource officer, Scott Peterson, refused to Baker Act Nick, despite the social workers

begging him to. He went home that day and the social worker didn't want to give up on it, so she called the

Department of Children and Families who sent someone. They also sent, he was being given treatment from

Henderson Behavioral Health in Broward County. They also sent a, their crisis team out to see him.

By the time DCF got there, of course, Nick was calmed down and he was home and he was saying,

"I was just kidding. I'm not really going to drink gasoline." So there was really nothing they

could do at that point. But the Department of Children and Families made a designation in their

report that Nicholas was a vulnerable adult due to mental illness. But the report basically said he's

not suicidal currently. He's with his mother. He's on medication. He has services. The mom knows how

to get help if she needs it. He's a, we're going to leave him where he is. Three days after being

declared a vulnerable adult due to mental illness, Nicholas went down to the gun store and bought his

first gun. He bought a 12 gauge shotgun. In Florida, you, when you buy a gun, there's a form that

you have to fill out. And on that form, there's a question that says, "Do you have a mental illness?"

And you just check yes or no. Nick checked no. All the paperwork was in order and he was able to

buy gun after gun after gun. And you know, one of the biggest consistent systemic failures we see is

a lack of interagency communication. How many, how many, that was his first, how many firearms did he

purchase over the, this, what was the time period here as an 18th birthday?

Well, between his 18th birthday, which was September of 2016 and the offense, which was February 14th,

2018, he had two shotguns, a couple rifles. Casey, do you remember how many guns he had total?

I believe it was six totally. He had three shotguns and three rifles that I recall. And I'm a hunter,

I have guns. And the first three guns that he bought were virtually identical 12 gauge shotguns.

It just goes to show you how nonsensical his obsession was. I mean, nobody who uses guns or hunts

would ever buy three identical 12 gauge shotguns. I mean, I have a 12 gauge shotgun that's specific

for turkey hunting. And I have a 20 gauge shotgun that's specific for quail and doves. And then I

have a rifle that's specific for deer hunting. And you, no rational person would ever buy three identical

12 gauge shotguns. It doesn't make any sense, but he could not control himself when it came to guns.

He was absolutely obsessed. And the newest thing that he would get turned on to, he would just

go out and buy. And he bought most of them, if not all of them with the assistance of his adoptive

mother, who was very much aware of how ill he was and who was scared of him, literally scared of him.

And to appease him, she was helping him buy firearms. How'd you find that out?

We got that from the, uh, I believe it was from the, some of the caseworkers from Henderson

behavioral health, who very much told her and perhaps somebody else from his middle school that

he should not be allowed to have firearms at all. And said that to Linda, because they had heard,

somebody had heard that Nick was going to be getting a gun from his mother for his birthday. And when

they learned that they went to Linda and said, it's very important to not get him a gun because he had

already demonstrated an obsession with guns and violence. And she told them it would be fine.

And the gun that she got him was an airsoft, you know, pellet gun. And shortly after getting it,

he shot and killed a neighbor's chicken with it, which is a crime that had he been arrested and

convicted of, even as a juvenile, it would have postponed his ability to buy any sort of real firearm

until the age of 21. But when he, when the police were called about the neighbor's chicken being shot,

Linda, the adoptive mother told the police officer that she was a single mother and that Nick had

autism. And the police officer went to the neighbor and said, look, he's got autism. His mother's a

single mother. Do you really want to press charges? And they said, no, we don't want to do it. And so he

wasn't charged with shooting the chicken. So it sounds like Nick's mother never called the police

on him then, even though she was scared of him because she had the need to make everything seem

like it was good. There was a couple times that the police did come. Kate, remind me of that.

She called the police on him constantly, but the cops would come and she would say, it's okay. He's

fine now. She called the cops a lot on his younger brother and Zach could be destructive in the home,

but mostly Zach stayed gone. The house was a war zone. Nick would be running around with a gun all the

time. He was fighting with Linda all the time. He was punching walls. And so Zach just would just

stay gone. So she would call the police on him for being a runaway. But mostly, I mean,

she called the police multiple times because Nick had assaulted her. There was one time that the

police came and Nick had barricaded himself in his room and the officers pushed through his little

barricade, put him in handcuffs and put him in the back of the car, but wouldn't arrest him. Linda

would never let him be arrested because she couldn't stand the idea of her child having

an arrest record. So she just would not let the cops take him. I think that there were something

like 40-some calls to the home. And we've learned through our investigation that those were the calls

that she actually made to either 911 or the non-emergency line that were documented. But she had the cell phone

numbers of multiple police officers who she would call routinely just for help when she was overwhelmed

or when one of the boys was acting out and the cops would just come by the house and talk to them,

but not arrest them.

She used the police like her husband. If the boys were out of control and wouldn't listen to her,

she would call the police and the police would come over. So much so that police officers knew her

by her first name. I mean, I believe wholeheartedly that these officers' motives were good and that they

were trying to help. But in retrospect, it was a massive error.

So once you've collected all this information, are you then having your meeting with the defense

team, specifically Casey, I guess, to discuss pleading him guilty and only doing a trial for the penalty

phase? Or had you already decided that early on and you guys were just collecting all of this

mitigation specifically for the penalty phase? It was a long-term debate within the team.

There were times when we had very heated debates and probably could be described as arguments or fights

about whether or not it should happen. And I think that probably the whole team believed for a long

time that it was the right thing to do. But we were, as you do in cases of this magnitude, reaching out to

leaders in the capital defense community for advice. And we were being told, "You don't plead in the

first phase in a capital case, no matter what." And, you know, it's very tempting to follow the advice

of people that you admire, even if they've never been in your shoes, because it just feels safe. You're

like, "Well, I did what so-and-so said, and that means I know that I'm doing the right thing." And I

have fallen into that safety zone countless times in my career. But I think we all knew that it was the right

thing to do. And I believe that ultimately the decision was made not so much as a strategic decision to be

advantageous to Nick, but the conversations that we had leading up to the decision was how much can we

expect these jurors to endure before they break? And how much can these surviving victims and their family

members endure before they break? And so we knew that this trial was going to be long no matter what.

But we had to do what we could to make it a period of time that jurors could actually still embrace

the information that we had to present after the state presented all their aggravation. Because you

can imagine, after the presentation of aggravation, mitigation sometimes pales in comparison. And so we

knew that if we had a first phase and a second phase that the jury was going to be exposed to this

horrifying evidence two separate times. Because the prosecutors, when they're really gunning hard for

death, they don't just present everything at the first phase and then at the second phase just add a couple of

things in for aggravation. They, at the first phase, just prove murder in the most mild way they possibly can to get a conviction. And then at the penalty phase,

they bring out the jumbotron crime scene photos and autopsy photos.

It's a strategic decision to try to horrify the jury so that the jury stops

listening to us when it's time to present mitigation. And so we knew the jury would have a limited attention

span for our mitigation. And we also very honestly and legitimately did not want to put witnesses to

witnesses to this crime surviving victims and their family members through two phases of trial. And I know

there's probably some people listening to this. They're going to think that that's bullshit, but it's true.

Those are conversations that we had, you know, I think it's also like when you present the case

like that to the jury, you're really just letting them know what to focus on, right? When you're

up front with them in the beginning, you're going to say, "This is what this case is about." You're

not making them go through this jury trial where you're going to like make some dumb argument to

ask them to find them not guilty. You're not going to do anything like that. You're

saying, "I want you to focus on this one specific thing." A jury trial can be scary as a defense

attorney. Am I making the right decision in any trial, really? And in those situations,

you do look to colleagues who've been there before to guide you. That way, no matter what the outcome

is, you know you did what you're supposed to do, right? Even if it's maybe not the right thing,

but hey, I was trained to do it this way and I did it this way. It was just a bad outcome.

And you say, "Well, that's okay." And then that is okay, too, if you go down that road as a defense

attorney, but to make the call, that was gutsy. So. Oh yeah, to go rogue. That's a...

Now, clearly, I guess you did explain this to Nicholas, and he just went along with it, I imagine,

right? And then... Did you feel like he could appreciate all the things when you were, you know,

laying it out for him, what the options were? Did you feel like he really appreciated it,

or did you just feel like... I mean, you already said he had the language processing issues.

So, do you feel like he appreciated what you were saying, or did you just feel like he trusted you

and was kind of like, "Hey, whatever you want to do?"

He definitely trusted us, inherently, because of the relationships that he had, primarily with

Melissa, Kate, and the fact investigator on the case, who were just incredible in terms of their

patience and dedication to him. I think he generally understood that he wasn't ever going to get out of

prison and that the choice was either going to be execution or life in prison. I'm not sure that he

had any way to conceptualize what that meant, but he definitely trusted us and trusted whatever decisions

we made. And we would explain things to him the best that we possibly could. By no means did he understand

everything that was going on, but he did meet that extraordinarily low bar of being competent.

And he always wanted to accept responsibility, always, from day one. He very much wanted to plead guilty and

accept responsibility. As a matter of fact, when he was arraigned just days after the shootings,

he refused to plead not guilty. And Melissa refused to plead not guilty on his behalf.

And she said, "We're not, we're not," she said to the judge, "I'm not pleading him not guilty." And the judge

entered a not guilty plea on his behalf at the arraignment.

Let's use this opportunity to give a shout out to Melissa. She was the other attorney on this case,

right? She was the the Broward defender that worked.

Yeah, she was lead counsel in addition to Tamara Curtis, Nawal Basham and David Wheeler were the

other lawyers on the team. And then there was, I mean, there was a lot of other people that provided

tremendous assistance to us. Gabby Darden, who was also a member of the team and other people who

added just invaluable insight at various times and helped us through some really dark periods.

So yeah, I mean, there's, we one time tried to make a list of all the people that had helped us over

the course of that nightmare. And I think we stopped listing people when we got to a hundred.

Yeah. Now, um, all right. So what's that like though, when you, when you go into court and

you have your client plead, uh, to 17 counts of murder and 17 counts of attempted murder, right?

That, that was, that was an open plea, right? There's no way the DA was going to cut a deal,

right? Is that something you had to do with the judge and even the judge would have had to have

agreed to allow him to plead open. Right. Or is that, was there pushback at all? No. And it,

the plea happened during the, we had started trying to pick a jury for the charge that Nick had picked

up for attacking a corrections officer. And as we, we didn't talk about that yet. As we expected,

I didn't know that was the thing. People were coming in for, they were showing up for jury duty

and coming into the courtroom and seeing Nick and people were having panic attacks and hyperventilating

and crying. And one person had to be sort of taken out of the courtroom. And that was,

I think when we had a collective discussion amongst ourselves and they said, it's time,

we need to shut this down. We cannot, we cannot put the community, the families, the world through

this, the court system. We're pleading guilty, obviously pleading guilty in exchange for life

in prison without the possibility of parole is out the window, but it's time to, to shut this down.

And that was, I think what really finally prompted us to, for lack of a better term, pull the trigger

on the decision. So he pled to all of the multiple charges stemming from the incident with the

corrections officer. So he pled to all of those and all four, all 34 counts of 17 attempted and 17

murders at the same time. So then now it's onto the penalty phase, phase two. Was there,

before we talk about jury selection for this case is, was there like any pre-trial motions

that you guys ran that were. Yeah. Besides that you can't talk about systemic failures.

Is there a real meaty one that you thought should have been granted, but wasn't that like really

helped you out, but then didn't, or is there one that really, that just jumps out at you that you

want to talk about. I filed a motion to prevent the jury from being taken to the crime scene. And that was

denied. And we did an immense amount of work establishing why that was unnecessary because

they preserved the building without cleaning it up at all. They didn't clean up the blood, the brain

matter, the urine, the broken glass, nothing. It was all there. And they intended to bring the jury

there to horrify them. And so we spent, yeah, we spent combined between the team, between the entire team,

probably between 250 and 500 hours inside that building, documenting all the reasons why it was

unnecessary for, for the jury to be brought there and drafted extensive motions about how we could,

we could have videographers come in, which we did. We hired our own videographer to create

a walkthrough of the building that would have been just as compelling to a jury's need to see the

inside of the school. All sorts of other options that we created and provided the court and the state

as an alternative to bringing them to the school. And that should have been granted by any reasonable

person. But it was denied without so much as a second thought in this case.

Right. And after our trial, there was a, there were two trials, I think, involving Scott Peterson. One

was the criminal trial and one was the civil trial. And the jurors in both of those cases also did

walkthroughs. And for one of them, I believe it was Scott Peterson's criminal trial. There was a

reenactment where someone went through the building and fired blanks so that the jury could see or hear

what Scott Peterson would have heard from outside. Scott Peterson, the resource officer at the school.

Right. Who was charged, I guess, for some sort of like criminal negligence, some type of negligence.

Yeah. All right. So that one, the judge said, nope, we're going to go see it. The crime scene,

because that's what the prosecution wants. Okay. Any other good meaty ones?

We tried really hard to protect the juror's identity. We requested that the jurors be referred to by

numbers instead of by names. I was in another high profile trial in Orlando, the Markeith Lloyd

trial. Markeith Lloyd killed his pregnant girlfriend. And while he was on the run, a female police officer

tried to apprehend him and he killed her also. So he had two very high profile trials. We had an

experienced judge and we referred to jurors only by number. I confess there were times that it was

confusing, but it was absolutely a hundred percent worth it. The jury selection process was very

efficient. We filed a motion twice and asked to be able to protect the identities of the jurors in

our case. It was denied twice, even though there was a case in Broward that involved some major intimidation

of jurors. And there was even a conversation in which the judge said off the record to the state,

are you sure you don't want to reconsider this motion? And she could have obviously just granted

our motion, but the prosecutors wouldn't give her permission to grant it. So our jurors names were

all over the news. That's crazy because here in California, even on a low-level misdemeanor,

we only ever use numbers. Yeah. Well, Mike wouldn't have liked it. That's what a lot of

the prosecutors said. Sorry, Mike Satz was the prosecutor and they said, "No, Mike wouldn't like

that. We're not going to do it. It's too confusing." And it wasn't that it was confusing. It wasn't that

confusing. It was that they wanted there to be community pressure on the jurors to vote for death.

Okay. Yeah. That's gross. It is gross.

Casey, let's talk about jury selection here. I know you had a big part of that.

What's it like doing jury selection on a death case, a capital case? Was this your first time?

No, unfortunately. I wish I've never done it, but I've done it a few times and I've come to believe

that in a capital case, the two things that really make a difference are your mitigation,

the quality and depth of your mitigation investigation, and the juries to whom you

deliver that information. Because when it comes down to life or death in a capital case,

you know, usually guilt is a foregone conclusion as it was in Nick's case. And so the question

becomes, are you presenting your mitigation to people who speak mitigation? And when I say that,

what I mean is that there are a lot of people, very rational, educated, smart people who don't

understand why mitigation is presented on behalf of a guilty murderer. They will say, you know,

I just don't, I don't understand, you know, he's guilty. Why are you telling me about his childhood?

That doesn't make any sense. That has nothing to do with how we punish. And that's fine. I respect

people that feel that way. I have people in my life that I love and respect who feel that way.

And so what we're looking for is people that say, yes, murder is absolutely inexcusable,

and you should be punished forever for committing it. But based on my experience as a human being,

I understand that a person is more than their worst act, and that there are a myriad of things that

contribute to a person doing these things. And even if what happened to this person didn't necessarily

make them do this thing, I still need to know the entire puzzle of this human being, where they came from,

what their family was like, what their childhood was like. Did they struggle with drugs and alcohol?

Were they abused or neglected as a child? All these things that we know as human beings affect

our lives, many of which, you know, in Nick's case, like the fetal alcohol spectrum disorder,

not his fault. The murders, definitely his fault. Being brain damaged from alcohol exposure in utero,

definitely not his fault. And so we are just trying to find jurors who are open to the idea of mitigation,

even after finding somebody guilty of first degree murder. But what we have learned from

experience is that it's very difficult to pick that type of a juror because you don't get a ton of time to

speak to each juror. And so what we focus on more is trying to get the people who are not open to

mitigation, get them excused for cause. Because that's what the United States Supreme Court says.

If you are a person to whom mitigation is irrelevant, then you are substantially impaired

in your ability to perform your obligations as a juror in a capital case. So if you don't speak

mitigation, if you don't understand why we're telling you about a guilty murderer's childhood,

that's fine. We respect the fact that you believe that you just can't be on the jury because then

you wouldn't, you would just sit there and wait to vote for death, right? We have to have people who

are like, I, this is a terrible crime. It makes me sick. It makes me angry. But before I punish,

tell me about this guilty murderer, who is he? Where did he come from? And so that's what we're

focusing on is trying to identify jurors who are not open to mitigation and trying to get them excused

for cause. And it's a delicate balance because we're not trying to condemn people or shame people or

somehow suggest that people who are not open to mitigation, that there's somehow there's something

wrong with them. There's not. It's totally fine that they feel that way, but it can be difficult to

get somebody to admit that, to say in a public courtroom in front of cameras and their fellow

jurors and all these other people to say, I think mitigation's bullshit. But there's a lot of people

who feel that way. So the, the sort of the, the skill becomes, how do you get somebody comfortable

enough to be like, here's how I really feel? It's sort of like when we do jury selection to try and find,

figure out who's racist. No one's going to come out and say, I'm racist, except in your case,

the stakes are much higher. In Florida, sometimes they'll say they're racist.

Could you describe any memorable moments with jurors or any strong reactions from jurors or even just

like, what was the reaction when they found out was the, the Parkland shooting, the shooter?

There was some people that were very appropriately emotional. I remember one woman that she was very,

she was just visibly having a difficult time. And the judge sent her out in a very polite way.

And we finished talking to a panel and he brought this one juror back in. And the judge just said,

you know, I might be wrong. I don't want to presuppose anything, but I thought I,

it seemed like you were having a hard time. And the woman just said, she said, my soul is so disturbed.

And I remember that it was just such a powerful thing for her to say. And so there were people that

had those kinds of reactions and they were, they were allowed to leave with, you know, gratitude from

the system. Um, there was some jurors that, uh, were openly hostile to Nick. There were some that would

started mouthing threats to him from the jury box. There was one juror that got so aggressive that

the deputies realized he needed to be taken out of the courtroom as quickly as possible. And when

they were directing him out of the jury box, he was walking as if he was going to go down the aisle

and out the back door, but he, he turned like he was going to come towards the defense table.

Um, and there was a time when I think it was during that time that there was he, that juror sort of

triggered a reaction and some other jurors. And, um, I think that was the time that one of the deputies

actually grabbed Nick and pulled him to the, towards the door because they were afraid that like some

people that were prospective jurors were going to attack the defense table. Um, am I right about

that, Kate? Is that that one time that they, that one of the deputies actually pulled Nick out of his

chair to protect him?

You know, they went towards Nick and Nick, even by then was so institutionalized. He, as soon as they

came near him, sort of jumped out of his chair and went with them and put his face into the wall and

put his hands behind his back as though he was getting ready to be cuffed up to be transported.

But yeah, it was, it was an intense couple of minutes. It started with one juror and it kind

of spread to the jurors next to that juror and in front of that juror. And as they were taking him

out, it, it sort of had the feeling of the beginning of the lynch mob. And we, of course,

managed to strike that entire panel of 60 jurors.

You struck them? You struck that whole panel? Like, what's the, that's the argument behind that?

Just that they'd been tainted by the display of outward aggression by those few jurors. I mean,

it, it was, it was a, it was one of the more disturbing experiences I've had in my,

definitely in my career. I mean, it was like, you, you, you felt very much, you'd be like,

oh, this is how people get dragged out of courthouses and hung on the courthouse lawn.

This is exactly how it used to happen. You know, like it was.

The jury selection was just that. Yeah, yeah. How'd you settle on the jurors that you settled?

How, how'd you guys pick those jurors? The way that we approach jury selection is we're not picking

a jury. We are just trying to get rid of the jury. We're not open to our theory of defense,

which in a capital case is, is mitigation. And so the only thing we do is try to strike those jurors

for cause and any that are, are not struck for cause we use peremptories on and the rationale

being that you should be left with a jury pool of people that are at least somewhat open to the idea

of a life sentence, even in a case of 17 cats of first degree murder and 17 additional counts of

attempted first degree murder. And so we did, I think an excellent job in jury selection,

getting rid of those jurors who were just never going to consider life in Nick's case.

And I understand why they feel that way. And I respect the fact that they feel that way.

But we ended up with a very conscientious and thoughtful group of jurors.

And I got the impression on the other hand that you also had to get rid of all the jurors who

could never kill somebody too. Right? Yeah. But they, they, they, they self-identify. They're very

much there. Yeah. They're like, uh, I don't want to be a part of this, you know? And so we have to

then talk to them though, because the United States Supreme court in, uh, in a very eloquent opinion

from 1968 said, but Witherspoon versus Illinois says that a juror who's opposed to the death penalty

can sit on a capital jury, as long as they are willing to set aside that, that, that, that, that

moral or philosophical or religious opposition to the death penalty for purposes of the trial. So

you always have to talk to those people and make sure they're never always never going to do it.

Never, no matter what doesn't matter. Can't set it aside would predetermine the sentence even before

the trial started. So we have to, yeah, they, they will self-identify. And so we, they are get,

they will get excused. We're trying to get excused to people on the other end of the spectrum. And

the idea is that you wind up with a pool of people that are somewhere in the middle.

All right, cool. So, all right, let's talk about this. So we got our jury.

Now it's time for the evidence in the penalty phase of the Nicholas Cruz trial.

Uh, tell us about that. Tell us about the, the prosecution's case. I mean, I guess,

I know we've already talked about the horrors of what happened. So what were they putting up?

Like, can you tell us about that?

Yeah. So what'd they hit you with?

And did you have a, did you have a sort of a rebuttal to that? Or you just,

you're just accepting it for what it is?

Yeah. I mean, there was nothing that we could do. We couldn't, you can't make the murder of 17

people in a school any less horrifying than it is. We decided not to say a word. We didn't put

on an opening statement until after the state was finished. And they had hundreds of crime scene

photos. They had crime scene videos, which they played over and over and over again. They played

the video in its entirety. And then for each victim, they pinpointed where on the video,

the person was being shot, whether they were running, they had these little circles.

And so they would, they would play it. And then they would play it again in slow motion.

And they just, it just over and over and over again with all of the videos.

The repetition with which they used the surveillance footage of these people being murdered and the

duplicative crime scene photos that they showed, you know, they would show a photograph of a murdered

teenager, and then they would show essentially the same photograph. But when the crime scene technician

took the second picture, they just took a slight step in one direction. And so they just kept admitting

photograph after photograph after photograph, they were extremely duplicative, but it got to the

point where the jurors, that, that, that level of horrified reaction reduced day, day by day.

And eventually I think that they just got numb to it to a certain degree. And that's not to say that

they're not permanently traumatized by it, which I'm sure they are, but I do think that the state

is really overreached in that regard.

Any other, anything, anything else you want to say about the, about the prosecution's case

before we move on? Any other comments or any other evidence you want to talk about?

The victim impact testimony was really powerful. I don't believe we've ever talked about that before.

And that's, you know, the testimony that's permitted under law for the family members of a deceased

victim to come to court and tell the jury about the unique quality of their loved one who was

murdered and the magnitude of the loss in their own personal lives. And so that was very emotional.

And I am glad that the law gives victims, family members the opportunity to do that because I

sincerely hope that it is somehow healing or cathartic in some way for them to take that step and

come into court and talk. But the way that the law is written is that despite the fact that the jury

hears all this victim impact testimony, it is not an aggravating circumstance under the law. So

the law in Florida specifically says, you know, you cannot sentence somebody to death based on victim

impact testimony. And I think jurors very understandably struggle with that. If, you know,

why are you telling me why are you exposing this to me and and then telling me that I'm not to consider

it as you know, as a reason to impose that seems absurd. So it's it's a it's a very powerful moment.

And it's a it's a difficult legal issue because the jury is not supposed to consider it. But you,

of course, know because jurors are human beings, how could they possibly not be impacted by it?

Yeah. So what's the relevance and how is that even allowed then during the trial? Usually,

I guess maybe at the end of the case, it's something you can allow that that's helpful for victims,

families. It's therapeutic and all of that. But in that moment, then why did you guys try to argue

for it not to come into evidence to allow the statements to be made? Was that a pretrial motion

you made? No, we filed a motion to have the statements put in writing first, because one of

the things that we do in capital defense about victim impact testimony, because it is so powerful,

is we want to make sure that the anticipated testimony is in line with the United States

Supreme Court precedent about what the parameters of that type of testimony are. And so we moved for

the victims' family members to first put it in writing so that it could be reviewed by us,

which sounds callous and unkind. But the true reason behind making that motion is to say,

we don't want to object while they're on the stand. They have this opportunity and we want to be

respectful to them and allow them to speak their mind without us jumping up and down and citing various

cases or legal rules. And so the state worked with the victims' family members. I imagine a tremendous

amount of hours doing that to make sure that what their anticipated testimony was going to be was in

line with what the law permitted. But yeah, it's a good question. It's not relevant as an aggravating

factor and very arguably it should not be permitted. And like you said, perhaps it would be more

appropriate after the jury has deliberated and rendered a verdict to allow the victims to speak to the

judge. But the law is the way that it is. And so the jury heard it. And I think that it was very

profound for some of them. But it's one of those things that we talked to them about during jury

selection is to tell them you're going to hear this victim impact testimony. And it is going to be

absolutely devastating to everybody in this courtroom, anybody who hears it. But it's very important that

you understand that it's not permitted under the law to be a reason to vote for the death penalty.

And so some jurors, and I appreciate their candor, would say during jury selection, I understand what

you're saying, but I can't do that. There's no way I can hear that and set it aside and have it not

impact my punishment decision. And we would thank them very much for their honesty. And in some cases,

they would be removed for cause, which of course is not a criticism of them. It's just that they were

very honest about they didn't think that they would be able to set that type of evidence aside.

Was there any one witness during the prosecution's case that really stands out to you? I mean,

you talked about the videos that were impactful, but was there any one witness that, for whatever

reason, is the one that you really remember?

For me, it was, uh, the son of Chris Hickson. Chris Hickson was a, uh, a coach and a campus monitor.

And he, uh, when he heard the gunshots from the 1200 building, he ran to the building and ran inside

without any concern for his own physical safety. He ran in that building to save the children,

try to save the children that he loved. And on his way to the building, he passed, you know,

a uniformed sheriff's deputy who was armed and hiding in an alcove and adjoining building who never did

anything. But Chris Hickson ran inside the building. And, um, almost as soon as he ran inside,

he was struck by a bullet fired by Nick. Nick was at the other end of the hallway. And, um,

his son testified, his son, Corey testified in victim impact. And I'm not sure exactly what

his diagnosis is, but Corey has some sort of developmental disorder. And, um, he took the stand

with his mother and was asked, you know, is Chris Hickson your father? And he said, yes.

And he said, is there, and the prosecutor asked, is there anything that you want to say to the jury

about your dad? And he visibly and audibly started getting choked up and put his arms around his mother.

And then just said in a very, very sweet, wonderful way. He said, I miss him. And that was the extent

of his testimony. And that was a really difficult moment and really sort of hit home, uh, the unique

loss that is suffered, uh, by the family of each victim. And so my heart really broke for Corey as it

did for all of the victims and all of their family members. But that was a moment that was really,

really powerful. Yeah. I mean, even right now, but that feels very powerful. So yeah. Um,

if you guys don't mind, I'm ready to move on and talk about the defense mitigation phase. You know,

I feel like we could talk about this forever, but I think we have enough good stuff to represent the

people's, the state's case. Is there anything else we're missing before we move on?

I don't think so. I think that, I mean, that all covers the major, the major aspects of it.

Okay. Um, okay. So that's, I mean, that's pretty much it for the, the prosecution's, uh,

proving aggravation. Um, so now you guys moved to the defense. It's time to present mitigation.

And I think you said, you said you reserved, uh, opening argument for this moment as well, right?

We did. There were a few things during the pendency of the case that Melissa and I

were just sort of immediately on the same page about in an almost spooky way. And I remember

texting Melissa and saying, Hey, what do you think about reserving opening? She texted back and said,

I just decided I'm definitely doing that. And I thought it was a really bold, but really brilliant

move because she was able to look at the jury and say, we told you, you were going to have to sit

through all of this aggravation. And every single one of you swore that you could listen to all that

aggravation and then come into this part of the trial, ready to listen to the mitigation and truly

consider not giving him the death penalty. So I think that the opportunity for her to really address

the jurors and sort of remind them of their oath and say like, okay, the bad stuff is behind us.

Now we got to talk about how we got here. I thought that it was really invaluable. And I think who knows,

but I think it made a difference. Well, the overall theme was that Nicholas has a fetal alcohol spectrum

disorder and a person who has an FASD will not necessarily become violent. The problem was that

he had FASD and he was never identified as having an FASD and never given the appropriate treatments.

So FASD was the vehicle through which we told the story. It was the lens through which we contextualized

all of the bad things that Nick has ever done, including the offense. So we started with the two

very strong witnesses we had who were around his birth mother when she was pregnant. Our first witness

was a woman named Carolyn Beacons. And I found Carolyn because she and Nick's mother, Brenda,

were arrested together for possession of cocaine in 1998 when Brenda was six months pregnant with Nick.

This is the woman, though, who had said she wanted Nick to get the death penalty, right?

Yeah. Many people that testified wanted Nick to get the death penalty.

And that was your first witness. Wow.

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah.

And she was, you know, she was so powerful and so compelling. And I didn't think that there

was anyone in the courtroom or the world who truly didn't believe what she was saying,

because she had no skin in the game. She came in because she felt compelled to share her story,

to share her truth. And it was the absolute truth. And there was some cross-examination of her because

she said the crack was in her pocket, but the crack was in someone else's pocket. The cross-examination,

I thought, was completely ineffective. Our second witness was Nick's biological half-sister,

Danielle. Carolyn and Brenda were arrested in June of 1998. Carolyn ended up going to prison and

getting sober and never seeing Brenda again. Brenda was in jail for a couple of days and then was

bonded out by Nick's adoptive parents. She then went back to the apartment that Nick's adoptive

parents were paying for. And she went and picked up her daughter, Danielle, who was living with her

mother and with Brenda's mother in Miami. Danielle was 12 at the time. And Danielle had this really

compelling vignette that she told me about finding out her mother was pregnant. Brenda picked her up

and drove her to Fort Lauderdale. And she remembered stopping at a gas station to remember which gas

station it was. And Brenda came out of the gas, they went to get gas. Brenda came out of the gas station

with a bottle of what she called Cisco bum wine, which is a fortified wine. It is an alcohol that is,

a bottle of it, a wine cooler size bottle of it, is the amount of essentially drinking six shots of

vodka. Brenda comes out of the store with one of those in a paper bag. She's getting gas. She has

on the vest. And when she takes a swig of the Cisco, Danielle notices a baby bump. Brenda gets back in

the car and Danielle says to her, "Are you pregnant?" And Brenda just says, "I was raped." Takes another swig off

of the bottle of Cisco, lights a cigarette, turns the radio up, and drives to the apartment. Now,

Danielle very vividly remembers walking with her mother every day to the store so she could buy

more Cisco bum wine, which she continued drinking daily. She remembers peeing in a cup for her

mother because Brenda was on conditional release and being drug tested, so she was using Danielle's urine

instead of her own. She remembers finding Shore Boy, which is something people use to smoke crack in the

bathroom. And about, I want to say, five weeks before Nick was born, Brenda was ordered into, court ordered

into rehab. Now, we never actually got our hands on the drug test that she had failed, but there are

notes in the adoption file that say that she was drug tested, she's concerned that she might have failed, she

doesn't show up for a bunch of her meetings, and then she's ordered into rehab and she stays there until Nick

was born. So the first two witnesses that we put on established not just that there was alcohol

exposure, but what the environment was like that Nick gestated in. There was just horribly traumatic

conditions for any human being, much less a developing fetus. There was drugs, there was alcohol, there was

very little food, very little sleep. Those were our first two witnesses, and that was all we got done on

the first day.

And is the prosecutors pushing back on this sort of idea that Nick was exposed, there was

first prenatal prenatal exposure, right?

Very much so. Yeah, yeah.

To his detriment, or her detriment?

Yeah, I think so. I mean, it was, it was so well documented. And well, I mean, I understand you could

suggest that Danielle has a bias that she's trying to protect her brother, but why would Carolyn come in

and get on the world stage and put herself out there as a former drug addict prostitute, if she wasn't telling the

truth? I think that it, it angered some of the jurors for the state to try to tell them that what Carolyn

and Danielle and the records, the extensive records that indicated there was prenatal alcohol exposure

were saying wasn't true.

So you made a decision then to start with the, you know, civilian witnesses, as opposed to starting with

educating the jury about what fetal alcohol spectrum disorder is.

Right. So we put on those two witnesses, and then we tried to sort of go chronologically, although it

was a little bit difficult, because we had some witnesses who were around Nick for several years at

a time. But we had a woman named Trish Devaney, who was a neighbor and a longtime friend of Linda,

who also had children, they had children at the same time. So she not only was able to observe Nicholas,

but she observed Nicholas and his brother and her own children. So she could see exactly how different

and how delayed he was. I thought she was a very powerful witness. We had other friends of

of Linda's who were friends with her at various times in her life. We had a woman by the name of

Finet Browd. Finet was Linda's friend from the time that they lived together in New York, and they moved

to Florida at the same time. So they'd known each other since the 80s. Linda and Finet had had a falling

out in around 2012, and she hadn't seen Nick or Linda since. And prior to that, Finet was the boy's

emergency contact in their records. And after 2012, and I noticed this before I ever met Finet,

anytime Linda filled out a form and there was an emergency contact, she would just write none.

That's how, that's how isolated Linda and the boys were by the time Nick was about 15 years old.

And Finet testified, we had to perpetuate her testimony because she had already been diagnosed

with cancer and was in hospice. Casey and I spent an entire day at her house taking her testimony.

The state was on Zoom. And her testimony was incredibly impactful because she had adopted

an autistic child. It was unfortunately not until some, quite a few years after Nick was born, but she

was a person who really had a lot of wherewithal and ability to chase down the resources that her son

needed. And her son was actually in a residential treatment program when I met him, when I met her.

So she was able to sort of, in hindsight, talk about all of Nick's behaviors and how

obviously impaired he was. The red flags she noticed.

For example, Nick had a, they called it a tiger fantasy. He would run around and pretend to be a

tiger. He would curl up his hands as though they were claws and he would get up in your face and scream

and roar when he was frustrated because he had no other way to express himself. And this went on into

his teenage years. It's one thing for a five, six-year-old to run around pretending to be a tiger. But when

a middle schooler is doing it, you know that there's something very wrong there.

And it's frankly, it's frankly still not completely gone.

Yeah. Yeah. We called a number of what we call lay experts, meaning people who dealt with Nick in

a professional capacity, but weren't people that we were paying to be there. I think that we hinged

our case much more on the testimony of lay witnesses and especially lay experts than we did with expert

witnesses, because we know that those people have more credibility than someone that's being paid to

to give an opinion. So we had his treating psychiatrists. We had his teachers. We had

his preschool director, a woman named Ann, who, when I met her, she wept. And she told me and Melissa

that she felt responsible for this tragedy because she said, "It's my job to make sure they can fly."

And he left here with broken wings. So we just had all of these people who worked in special education,

who had decades of experience, who would say things like, "I'd never met a child like Nick before,

and I've never met a child like him since." We called his preschool.

These are people who knew him when he was little.

Right.

Like years before the event.

Long before.

Yeah.

So that was pretty impactful to let the jury know this was something that was serious and

noticeable well before this tragedy.

What are they saying about Nick in their testimony, like specifically?

So Nick was first identified as having problems and put into the special education

system when he was three years old. And Ann Fisher from his daycare was the person who referred him

to Child Find to get those evaluations and get those services. And she noticed before he was two years

old that he was delayed and impaired. And she suspected even then that Nick was prenatally exposed to drugs

and alcohol. And Linda initially, even when he was an infant, was insisting that he was her baby.

Eventually she came off of that. And then eventually she admitted that the girl, the birth mother had had

some drug problems, but she told Ann that the birth mother had been in a group home and was being drug tested

throughout the pregnancy. And that was something that Linda kept telling people for the rest of Nick's life.

We had his preschool teacher testify. And this was, he, he was in a special preschool for kids with

disabilities. It was a language-based preschool. This is between the ages of, I believe four and six,

or maybe it was three and five. Nick would hide constantly. He could not deal with his being around

his peers. He would shove himself in between the filing cabinet and the wall just to hide from having

to interact with people because he just was not capable of it. So his teacher brought in a large

cardboard box from home with a hole cut in the side of it. And that was where Nick spent his days

in preschool. It didn't matter if it was lunchtime, lesson time, playtime. She would go in there with

him. She would give him books. He would sit in there and do his work. And that was where he spent

all of preschool because he just, he just could not function even in a supportive environment like

a special needs preschool. So that was the kind of evidence that we put on throughout our case. And

then jumping ahead to the state's rebuttal, they just brought in two experts who were paid nearly a

quarter of a million dollars each to say there's nothing wrong with Nick. Like he just had conduct

disorder. He's just a bad seed. When you have somebody like Susan, a preschool teacher with 20 years of

experience in special education saying there's always been something very, very fundamentally

wrong with his child. And he needed so much help. Having someone come in after the offense that's

been paid such an astronomical amount of money to say there's nothing wrong with him. It just did not

land with any of the jurors. Wow.

Um, so I'm curious, Kate, Casey had sort of said that he thought it was really impactful the way that you

came up with the order of the witnesses, the chronology that you laid out.

I'm curious what was behind or how you made that strategic decision to call the witnesses in the

order you did. Like I was saying, you didn't start off sort of explaining fetal alcohol spectrum

disorder to the jury. You started off with these lay witnesses. And I'm, I'm just wondering

how you made that strategic call.

Well, I don't think you have to explain to people necessarily that your mother drinking and smoking

crack and not eating or sleeping when you're pregnant is bad, right? We established that it was,

there was like the pregnancy was really bad. And then we talked about Nick and we brought out a

lot of these bad things that he did. He was drawing swastikas on his schoolwork. He was screaming

profanities in school. He was getting into fights. He was obsessed with guns. He was punching holes in the

walls. And it was, and then we brought in our experts at, at what ended up being the end of

our case, because it was time for us to contextualize his behavior. It was like, okay, we've seen where

his origin is and why it was a problem. And we know now how bad his behavior has been and that there's

something wrong with him. And then we brought in at the end, Paul Connor and Ken Jones are two

experts to explain fetal alcohol spectrum disorder and contextualize that behavior through that lens.

Nick was also exposed to narcotics. So his mom was using crack while she was pregnant with him.

Is that all part of the FASD diagnosis? It's the exposure to alcohol and drugs, or

is that a separate category, the exposure to crack and how that can affect

the areas that you were presenting to the jury in terms of deficits for Nick?

I mean, any substance during pregnancy is harmful to the developing fetal, but none of,

no substance in the world, not crack, not meth, not heroin, not ecstasy is worse for a baby than

alcohol. Alcohol is a teratogen that destroys brain cells and it is exponentially worse than any other

substance that exists to a baby. That being said, if a person is drinking and if they're drinking some,

but they're also sleeping and eating and taking vitamins and taking care of themselves, the impact

may not be as bad as if you're, if a person is drinking, drinking heavily, also using drugs,

not smoke or smoking, not sleeping, not eating, not taking care of themselves, not taking vitamins.

The impact can certainly be exponentially worse on the child. But if you had to choose between being

exposed to crack or being exposed to alcohol in the womb, you would choose crack every time.

That is, that's a lovely tagline and I wouldn't have seen talking.

Okay. So, so Ken, Ken's testimony had a lot to do with what

FASD looks like in children. And Ken, even now 50 years after writing his first article about FAS,

still every Friday sees kids in his clinic and makes diagnoses and provides support to parents and

provides them resources to get the kind of assistance that they need. So Ken was able to talk about what

a child with FASD needs. And a child with FASD needs a parent or two parents that understand that his deficits are

lifelong and has the ability and the patience to give the child support that they need forever.

And that was why Ken was, I thought, so effective in testimony because Nick received a lot of services.

He had people at his house hundreds of times. There were case managers, there were therapists,

he was in special classes, he was in special everything, but it was never the right kind of services.

So Ken was able to say that definitively and say, yes, the people in Broward County Schools,

many of them did a wonderful job. The people at Henderson, some of them really cared and they

wanted to give Nick all the services that they had, but they didn't know what they were dealing with.

And it was during Ken's testimony that we decided that it was time to shut down our case and we rested

somewhat famously the next day. We still had dozens of witnesses that we were thinking about calling

at that point. But I thought at that time that our, our case had been presented and wouldn't possibly

get any better than it was at the end of Ken Jones's testimony. Casey did his direct and I was

sitting there watching him and I was watching the jurors and we had 22 jurors, 12 plus 10 alternates

and all 22 sets of eyes were glued on him the entire time. They were nodding, they were taking notes,

they were smiling when he smiled. And I was sitting there thinking to myself like, it's time,

we should just rest. And then Melissa handed me a note and said, we should rest.

Yeah, this was, this was during Casey's direct.

Yeah. During redirect was when Melissa and Kate had this exchange. I can't remember how it happened,

but one of them wrote a note and that said, I think we should rest and handed it to the other.

I think Kate wrote the, wrote the note and handed it to Melissa and Melissa.

Like vice versa.

Okay. Yeah. But the other one was like halfway through writing the same note and was going to

hand it to the other person. It was literally simultaneous. And I didn't know that. I mean,

I felt very good about what Dr. Jones's testimony had been, but when I turned around from the podium,

when I had done redirecting Dr. Jones, I turned around to walk back to the defense table. I heard one of

the prosecutors whisper to his fellow prosecutor, they're going to rest. And I remember thinking to

myself, that's a, that's a clear admission of how badly you just got your fucking teeth kicked in by

this witness.

All right. So who did the closing argument for the defense?

Melissa, the lead counsel, the same one that did the opening statement, which is a decision that we

all sort of made collectively that we thought that the, that the jury should hear that the, you know,

the first words from the defense and the last words from the defense should come from the same person.

Right. And Melissa, I imagine gave a great closing argument.

Absolutely masterful and beautiful. And, you know, she delivered it masterfully. She,

she worked with Kate. Kate is, is, I also know is, should be given a lot of credit because if she

worked with Melissa on it a lot, I read her, I've read Melissa's closing several times and talked to her

about it, but she absolutely, she did an absolutely incredible job. And we were all so tired and so

traumatized and so scared. And she did not come across that way at all. She has, she had the ability

to set all of that aside and really, really express the passion that she feels about the appropriateness

of the penalty. And, uh, I think it res, oh, I know it resonated with a lot of the jurors. Um,

I think it resonated either, even with some of the jurors who ultimately voted for death. I,

we've talked to some of the jurors and we have never heard that there was anybody in the deliberation

room arguing that the defense was in any way full of shit, which I think is probably the greatest

compliment that we could get that the, the, even the killers think that we told them the truth.

Or awesome. And how, how long did it last for? Was it a day, two days?

Oh, it was, it was maybe, I don't know, two hours, but I thought that the smartest thing that she did

was we, we took, we had put all of his records into evidence, thousands of pages of school records,

thousands of pages of mental health records. And before she started her closing argument,

we actually got them all from the clerk and put them in the center of the room next to the podium

or next to the lectern where she would give the closing argument. And so she was able to say,

listen, don't believe a single word that we said, if you don't, here's every bit of it.

And we had throughout the case, we had referenced specific pages and page numbers,

and people had been taking notes. And she said, you just go back there and you read every page of

this as you, if you want to, you take as long as you need to. But I think that it was just so

powerful, having all of those records, just boxes and boxes and boxes of records saying that there's

something very wrong with Nick and being able to use those as demonstrative, I thought was really

effective and powerful.

So then the prosecutor, his, or was it his, his closing argument? I'm sorry. Yeah. He was just like,

what? No, all that, all that, you know, he's, he doesn't have, he doesn't have FASD. He's an evil

person.

A lot of just recitation of the gruesome facts that he had pled guilty to. So there was no,

you know, it wasn't like it was, it was not even close to some sort of masterful oral recitation that

was persuasive or anything. It was just, he did this, all these people died. Um, you know,

it was also, um, is when, when Melissa's arguing, she's, I mean, she's also arguing for life without

the possibility of parole, right? The saint, she's also arguing, this is also a pretty, this is a

pretty stiff punishment. He will, for the rest of his life, be in a cell in a small cell by himself

or whatever that means, you know, for the rest of his life. And that is, that is, you know, make,

you know, retribution for the victims and their families and things like that as well.

Right. That is also adequate. I see heads nodding to something that Casey said. I don't know if he

said it at the beginning of when we started recording, or if this was in the, the worksheet

you filled out, but I really liked when you said it was justice without violence. Was that something

that kind of Melissa argued? Like, listen, it's, we're not saying if you don't vote for death that

he gets to go home. Like this is, there is a punishment. You are going to get justice for all of

these victims. Yeah. I mean, she, you know, several times reminded them, this is not, this is not a

question of somehow escaping justice or escaping punishment. And what we have presented to you is

not an excuse or justification or defense. It is just a reason it separates Nicholas from the class

of people who deserve to die because there are people, you know, who have committed terrible first

degree murders who, you know, who aren't impaired the way that Nicholas is almost everybody or everybody,

everybody I've ever been involved in, in a capital case, they are damaged profoundly, but Nick is,

is damaged in a different way. And there's a, there's a case from the Florida Supreme Court,

I think it's from the 1990s where they're discussing a defendant, a capital defendant who has fetal alcohol

spectrum disorder. And even the Supreme Court of Florida said like, we can envision nothing that is

less your fault than what happens to you in utero. And so that was really the crux of what Melissa was

arguing is he didn't ask for this. He doesn't want to be this way. He would give anything to not be

impaired the way that he is, but he's essentially a perennial child. And that is not his fault. He's

entirely at fault for what happened at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. And he will be punished

for that for the rest of his life. But we do not have to kill him. It's always a discretionary decision

by each individual juror based on their own individual moral assessment of the defendant and the crime.

And she, you know, very masterfully was able to convince a small handful of jurors that life was

appropriate and severe and sufficient and adequate, and just the right thing to do under the circumstances.

So, um, how, how long did the jurors deliberate for?

All told, I think it was maybe six hours all put together. Is that right, Kate?

No, it was longer than that. Because remember, we, we read, we, we closed, and then we quit for the

day. And then we went back in the morning, and she just charged them. And then they deliberated

until five or six that evening. And then they came back first thing the next morning, and within

maybe 30 minutes of coming back, and they had a verdict.

And then, yeah, what's that? So how's that the reading of the verdict in the capital?

Did you sleep at all the night before?

No, they, you know, she still has to read every word of, of the verdict form. And for each of the 17

counts, there were eight or nine aggravating circumstances. And so the first part of each

count, they had to go through every aggravator for each of the 17 people, find that they existed,

find that they were sufficient to warrant a sentence of death. And then there are two

sort of questions about mitigation. First, it's that mitigation exists. And then there's a question

of, does the aggravation outweigh the mitigation? And if and only if everyone agrees that the

aggravation outweighs the mitigation, then you go on to the final question, which is, do you

sentence to death? And in our case, they stopped at the fourth question. They said that the aggravation

did not outweigh the mitigation on every count, but she still had to read eight or nine aggravators,

all of the, so 17 times. It took, I think it took over an hour. I think it was about an hour and a

half to read the entire thing. And you can imagine the courtroom was very, very tense. The judge was

slamming pages down in between as she was reading the counts. Um, I think, and I, I, I just stared

straight ahead, but I think that every time she said no, uh, family members of that particular

victim often would get up and just run out of the courtroom. It was, uh, it was incredibly

tense and it just, it just went on and on and on forever.

Wow. So, I mean, so the first time you, I mean, when you, the first no, the aggravation did not

outweigh the mitigation, like, was there, uh, was there excelling at the defense side or you guys

keep it cool and stoic because of the, the victims and their families still being in the courtroom?

Was there any reaction, the Nicholas reaction?

I didn't understand.

No.

I thought I, no, I thought I was hallucinating for the first two counts. Um, it took, I think it took a

few counts to kind of start to sink in, but no, at some point, Melissa asked him, do you know what's

happening? And he said, no. Um, but it, you know, I still didn't exhale until after the 17th. No,

because I could imagine the pressure in the court, in the jury room, as they went through count one,

count two, count 12, I could imagine some juror finally breaking down and he only had to get sentenced

to death one time to be sentenced to death. So I really, I didn't exhale and I don't think anybody

did until, um, until after the 17th verdict was read.

So the case is done. Are we done talking about the case then?

Anything else we want to share about it?

Um, the other thing that I think is probably worth mentioning is, um, Kate catching the, uh,

state trying to tamper with one of our mitigation practices.

What? Yeah.

When was this?

So there was a guy named Jack Basie who was, um, he was the middle school principal at the regular middle

school at Westglades middle school when, when Nick was there and he had retired a couple of months

before the shooting and no one had ever spoken to him. And I went to his house to talk to him.

And I, I remember walking up to his door. I'll never forget it because there was a,

an MSD strong sticker on the window next to the door, like right.

Not a great sign for, you know, I remember thinking like,

I, well, you know, I got a lot of doors slammed in my face. I remember thinking like,

well, at least this will be quick. And he'll just slam the door in my face.

But he, he had so much insight. This was a guy who had spent 30 years as an educator. He had

volunteered to be the principal at different behavioral centers because he knew the importance

of bringing in community mental health, the kids that were having behavioral problems. I mean,

he had retired. He was a guardian. I'd light him. I mean, the guy was just, he is, he's a saint of,

among us. And we ended up talking for a long time. And I will never forget the thing that he said to me.

He said, they didn't believe me when I told them how sick he was.

So we, I spent a lot of time with them. We asked him to testify. He said that he would.

Somehow the state just like missed him on our, on our witness list and never deposed him.

So the morning of his testimony, it's like seven 30, he's brushing his teeth and his phone rings.

And it's a school board attorney who we'd known from his time at the school board. And also on the

line is one of the prosecutors in our case, Jeff Marcus. And so they're on a three-way call.

And the school board attorney says to him, Jack, we're just concerned about what your testimony

might mean for some of your friends back at the district. So they're trying to say like,

we don't want you to say the things that you know, because it might come back badly on the school

district and you and your friends. So Jack, you know, Jack is not the kind of guy that will be

intimidated. He was pissed that he knew this was wrong. And he came down to the courthouse and he told me

about it. And I told Melissa and Casey, and we asked Jack if he would write an affidavit about

it. And he did. Of course, we filed, we asked for some time. We had to file a motion to recuse,

file all kinds of motions. All of that was denied, but he got on the stand and testified and told the

jury about the phone call and told the whole world about the phone call because it was obviously being

live streamed everywhere. And and we, you know, and the and the jury saw it for what it was. They knew

that it was, again, the state trying to hide the truth and us just trying to deliver the truth and

the facts in the way that it actually happened. That is so just I mean, it's gross, but there's

just a level of disappointment. It's not surprise. I think anyone who's been doing this job,

it's not surprising when the prosecutors stoop to these kinds of things, but it still is just it's

so disappointing. You hope, especially in a case with the stakes are so high, you want them to be

more ethical than they are. You really want them to come at this. You want them to take it seriously,

maybe get their own expert and and respect the process, because, yes, everyone's upset about

what Nick did. And yes, there are all these victims, but still that responsibility and what

they're asking people to do to sentence this this young man to die. You just hope they come at it

from a better place. And it's just so very disappointing. Well, you know, this is only three.

Was it three or four jurors that voted no on the death penalty? How many?

Three voted for life, two abstained, and the rest voted for death. So yeah, well, we know from

the capital jury project that jurors, a lot of jurors like to try to hide in the pack and be like,

you know, I'll just go along with what other people are doing, or they don't really want to

make a decision. It's a difficult decision. I don't mean that in a critical way. It's a horribly

difficult decision that they're asked to make. And understandably, they would prefer to not

make it, you know. And the truth is that if you have one person that decides to vote for life,

what the other people are voting is sort of irrelevant because it's that one vote that

determines the outcome. But you're very much right about the approach that they took. You know,

it backfired. They just wanted to say this was a horrible crime. But the thing was,

is that when we talked to the jury about the crime, I think that we talked about it in a more horrifying

way than the state did. I think that the way that we talked, particularly in jury selection,

when we were talking to the jurors about it, we talked about what he did in a way that showed how

horrified we were by what Nick had done. And I think that I think that we gained a lot of credibility

with that. And I think that the state trying to just remind them over and over again, he did these

things, and they're terrible. I think a lot of jurors were like, "No shit! Like, he pled guilty! We

know he did them! We know! We get it!" Did you guys talk to any of the jurors after the case was over?

We've talked to a couple, yeah. They believed wholeheartedly that Nick was exposed to great

amounts of alcohol and drugs in utero, and that he consequently had permanent brain damage as a result.

And they were sickened and horrified by what he did and had moments where they hated him and very much

wanted him to die. But based on what the law requires, which is them to make an evaluation based

on their own individual moral determination, when it came to their morality, they had no choice but to

vote for life, because that's what their morality dictates their own minds, which is what the law requires

of them. And during deliberations, there were jurors back there saying, "Well, we need to give them the death

penalty for the victim's family members," which is totally illegal. And some of the other jurors were

like, "You can't do that." And the killers didn't care. They didn't care that it was a violation of their

oaths to vote for life based on sorrow and compassion for the victim's family members. They knew they weren't

allowed to do that, and they didn't care. So, where are we now? How do things stand? I mean,

we just had this horrific, tragic shooting in Florida. All these, you can see along the way

where all the ball was dropped. Has there been any changes in Florida, any changes in the school system?

So, a really interesting thing happened in Florida. First, they raised the age to buy

a gun to 21, and then they were sued by the NRA. And then the state of Florida government

hired an expert in juvenile and adolescent brain development who would testify that

juvenile brains are different and that brains are still developing until 25 and that the decision-making

of 18 to 21-year-olds is not reliable. Which is funny because that's the kind of thing that we

say all the time when we have clients that are under 21 or under 25, and the government says it's

bullshit. The law stood for a short time, and after the verdict, and after they changed,

they took away unanimity in the death penalty world, they are now undoing all of the changes that were

done to the laws, the gun safety laws, after Parkland. So, we're going to be going back to 18 here in Florida.

My last question, if you're comfortable sharing, is what this case, what's the lasting impact to you

personally? Not what you want people to take away. But I think, you know, it really has been an honor

to talk to you about this. This job is so hard. This job can just beat you down when you're just

handling a misdemeanor. And I think that you sat in some of the deepest trauma, both from the victims

and their families, and from your client and learning about your client's history. You sat in this trauma

for years, and you hopped onto a case that was not going to win you any popularity points. This is a

national case. And you sort of briefly alluded to the fact that after the trial, some of the victim

impact statements, people said not so nice things about the defense team. And I really want people to

listen to this and understand that this is a hard job for us, and that this takes a toll. So, if you're

comfortable, I'd really be curious to hear what the personal lasting impact of being on this case has

been for you. Yeah, I mean, this case and what we went through, it'll be something that's part of me

forever. It was extremely damaging to my personal relationships. I was very fortunate that I have a very

supportive husband who tolerated my not only physically being gone for seven months when I was in

trial and for many, many weeks leading up to the trial, but also just emotionally not being present for

probably the last two years and for a long time after the trial. It took me a really long time to

assimilate myself back into my life, back into my home.

I try to take a little bit of positivity away from it. I am grateful for the opportunities to educate

people about FASD. And I sometimes tell myself when I'm struggling with like, should I have cake for

dessert? Should I take this trip this weekend? Or should I stay home and work? You know, if when you see

so many teenagers getting up and leaving for school in the morning and not coming home that day. And if

that can happen in a place like Parkland, anything can happen anywhere. And it's a horrible truth,

but it also kind of changes, I think for me, a little bit of my perspective on, on how I try to live my

life and try to, um, you know, help people, but also remind myself that there's still beauty in the

world and there are still reasons to enjoy being alive. So it's something that I don't, I'm certainly

not over it. I don't think I'll ever be over it. I'll never be the person that I was on February 13th,

2018. Like, you know, many thousands of people out there and I don't pretend to have any right to

complain because I signed up for this stuff, but you're right. It is, this job is very hard. It does

take a toll on you. And if this case was certainly no exception. And Kate, why, why did you become a

mitigation specialist? Well, I followed my mom into the profession. So, you know, I, I was raised to

believe in justice. I was raised to believe in helping indigent people. And that was a sort of

noble pursuit that I, I admired my mom for doing for her entire life. And then I followed her into this

profession 15 years ago. And she, and your mom was, I, I reminded me again, she was a public,

she was a public defender and she was in private practice. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Um, and, and I, I took

the job initially because I was looking for something that was more fulfilling than what I was doing,

which is I was a motorcycle mechanic for nine years before I started doing this work. And the connections

that I make with my clients and advocating for people who are the most forsaken sinners in our

society is something that I think is important. And, and although it's certainly has its drawbacks,

it's something that's a point of pride for me as well. Yeah. Yeah. And Casey, what about you? What

about what's the lasting impact on this case? Is that was, that was a question, right, Lauren,

the lasting impact, the lasting impact, and why did you become, uh, a defense attorney or do capital

cases? And, uh, I went to law school because I wanted to be a public defender. My ultimate dream,

even before I went to law school was to be a capital defender. So that was the sole reason that I went

to law school, which is, you know, a decision that I sometimes regret in its entirety.

But, um, we understand, um, the lasting impact of this case for me has been, uh, has probably just

been a solidification of what I believed about the world beforehand. And this case is just solidified

it for me. And that is that most people are cowards and that the number of people that are holding our

society together are so few and far between. Because if you look at the story of Nick's life,

there is this small handful of real heroes, people that saw that Nick was damaged and knew that he needed

help and they did everything in their power to try to alert people to that factor to get him the help that

he so desperately needed. And they, their efforts ended up being negated by people in higher positions who

just essentially told them to stay in their own lane. Because those persons, those people with greater

authority didn't have the courage to take the steps necessary to address the problem. And everybody

just passed the problem on to the next person and swept things under the rug. And there are even

situations involving Nick where documentation that people turned over to the proper authorities was

destroyed because whomever received that documentation wanted to pretend that they'd never gotten it.

And so I, my, my, my heart breaks for these people that tried to do the right thing, who saw the writing

on the wall and knew that Nick was a potential threat to himself and other people. And their voices were

snuffed out by bureaucrats and people with greater levels of power than they had. And I think that is so

incredibly tragic because we as a society, we like to talk about how much, how, how, how enamored we are with

heroes, how enamored we are by people who do the right thing under difficult conditions. And there is

virtually no one who's willing to actually do that. There's a very small number of people, but most people

just want to go about their lives and just do the bare minimum in their jobs to get a paycheck so they can

go home and watch Netflix and order Papa John's and no one gives a fuck beyond that. And I think it's just

such a pathetic and sad commentary on the world and on the United States. And I'm afraid that situations

as dire as this are not going to change things. And so my outlook since the case, I think has probably

gotten worse. People that know me well say that I'm much more angry now than I used to be. And I was

pretty angry before this trial, but anger is not a real emotion. It's just, it's a, it's a mask for

whatever you're experiencing. And I think that the anger that I'm experiencing now is just a lack of

faith in this society, a lack of faith in people to do the right thing when it's difficult. And I don't

know if there's anything that will change that. There's so much hatred and conflict in our country

right now. And I honestly don't see a real significant light at the end of the tunnel that

we are currently in. I pray to God that there is, and that we make it through this test in a way where

we can still recognize ourselves on the other side. But what this case showed me is that there are people

with tremendous resources and power who will say things that they know are not true. And they will

refuse to take responsibility. And they will try to say that the only thing that's wrong in the world

is that people like Nicholas Cruz exist. And it's just such a cowardly and lazy way to approach the

world. You cannot, you cannot fix humanity by killing people. Hitler tried to do it in his own

fucked up warped way, and it never would have worked. And we still can't do it. We have to address the

problems that damage people and try to save them. And we have to stop just as defense lawyers, even we have

to stop trying to just pull people out of the river. We have to go upstream and try to stop them from

falling in. And for whatever reason, our society is so opposed to preventative care. We wait until

a disaster strike. And then we spring into action. And by then, it's just too fucking late.

Wow. Wow. I mean, normally, I mean, I feel like normally we end the show on a positive note.

But all I can say is...

There's not much positive from this.

Yeah. But all I can say is, like, you know, thank you so much for being on the show and

sharing your story of the defense of Nicholas Cruz.

And even aside from the show, for doing what you do. I mean, there are going to be people who

don't understand why you did it and won't like you for doing it. We are not those people. Our audience,

it's not made of those people. We understand why you did it. I'm so grateful that you did it. I'm

grateful you took the time to talk about it. We understand that it does take a toll. And I hope

that you start to feel a little bit better, maybe. I don't know how that will happen to carrying that

with you. But I am grateful for your service, sir.

Well, we appreciate your interest in talking to us. It's really nice to know that there are some people that

want to hear the story and believe that there's something good can come of it. Because, yeah, we

don't... We have... There are no accolades or benefits associated with having been a member of the

Nicholas Cruz defense teams. It's usually not for public defenders in general. It's not really our jam.

It's not glamorous. There's not a line of people waiting to pat you on the back and shake your hand.

No, I think that... But it is important work.

Yeah. It's just that most people don't think of it that way. I mean,

the number of times that I've been... That I tell somebody what I do, and they'll pat me on the

back and say, "Well, you're doing the Lord's work," or something along those lines. And I know that as

soon as I turn around and walk away, they think to myself, "What a fucking moron." Like, why would anybody do that?

To be fair, I ask myself, this gentleman gets me wrong. Like, why did I miss you?

They'll say, "Wow, I couldn't do that." You know? Oh, wow, I couldn't do that. You know?

Yeah. Proudly, too. But that's the thing. They could. Like, I went to the third lowest-ranked law

school in the continental of the United States. And it's been since shuttered by the American Bar

Association. So you don't have to be a real wizard to do what I do. And I don't even think of myself as

a person of, like, real significant courage. Like, I'm scared all day long, every day doing this

fucking job. But I say to people that I meet, I'd be like, "You gotta understand, if I can do this,

anybody can." You know? And the idea that most people couldn't do it, I think it's just one of

the lies that we tell ourselves to absolve ourselves of the responsibility of doing what we think is right.

Well, I'm really hopeful that because you and people like you share your story and context like

this, that we can start, I don't know, changing that sort of tide of public opinion. I'm really

hopeful that people will want to listen to this and that they're going to hear that there's more

to this than just that your client was some evil guy. Because I think you're right. That's a lazy

way out. And it does nobody any good. And I don't even believe that it does anything good for the

victims in the case to be so dismissive. There's no way to fix things that you don't acknowledge.

That was great. It was important to have you on the show for people to understand why

Nicholas got the verdict that he got, you know, and how it happened and the reason why and why it was

a just verdict. So thank you for your commitment to justice. You and Kate, Casey. Kate, thank you so

much for being on the show today. Appreciate it. Take care. Thanks for tuning in to this week's

episode of Another Not Guilty. Shout out to Daniel Mark, original A&G theme music composer,

and Mike Grimm for the remix. And guess what? We'll be back in two weeks with Another Not Guilty

straight from the trenches.