• Nikolas Cruz killed 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.
• A jury decided that Cruz shouldn’t be put to death.
• Family members of the victims criticised the jury’s decision not to give him the death penalty.

Nikolas Cruz, the man who killed 17 students and staff at a school in Parkland, Florida, with a semi-automatic rifle, was supposed to be given a life sentence by a judge in Florida on Wednesday.

Last month, a jury decided that Cruz, who is 24 years old, shouldn’t be put to death. Instead, they chose to give him life in prison without the chance of parole for one of the deadliest mass shootings in U.S. history.

Cruz pleaded guilty to murder with premeditation last year. This year, he went through the three-month trial for the death sentence.

Broward County Circuit Judge Elizabeth Scherer agreed to the prosecution’s request that Cruz’s victims’ families be given a chance to speak before the sentence was given. On Tuesday, victims gave statements about how the crime affected them.

Several family members of the victims criticised the jury’s decision and a state law that says all 12 jurors have to agree for a convicted person to be put to death.

“How bad would the crime have to be for the death penalty to be right?” said Annika Dworet, the victim’s mother. Nicholas Dworet, 17, was killed in the attack.

Some of Cruz’s family members also criticised his defence attorneys. Dworet said she saw them “giggling with this cold-blooded killer” during the trial. Tuesday, the defence lawyers made a pointless argument to the judge that Cruz had a constitutional right to a lawyer.

Many family members of the victims spoke directly to Cruz, who sat incomprehensible behind big glasses and a COVID-19 mask at a table with his public defenders. Anne Ramsay, the mother of 17-year-old Helena Ramsay, told him he was “pure evil.” Inez Hixon called him a “domestic terrorist” for killing her father-in-law, the school athletics director Chris Hixon.

Cruz was 19 when he attacked Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, which is about 30 miles (50 km) north of the courthouse in Fort Lauderdale. He had been thrown out of school.

Some of the survivors went on to start a youth-led movement for stricter gun laws in the United States, which has the highest rate of private gun ownership in the world and has seen a rise in mass shootings.

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Nikolas Cruz, 24, shot and killed 17 people at Florida's Marjory Stoneman...