The jury is sequestered, remaining at an undisclosed hotel with no cell telephones and no tv. Jurors are permitted one telephone contact a working day and that will be monitored by a regulation enforcement officer.
The jurors will be voting 17 moments – the moment for each individual target. For the jurors to propose a demise sentence for a unique victim, they initially have to unanimously concur that the prosecution proved past a realistic doubt that the killing involved at the very least just one aggravating circumstance as proscribed under Florida law.
This element should not be difficult – the outlined aggravating situations incorporate knowingly creating a terrific danger of loss of life to several persons, committing murders that ended up “in particular heinous, atrocious, or cruel” or committed in a “cold, calculated, and premeditated way.” They then have to unanimously agree that the aggravating variables warrant thing to consider of the death penalty.
They then need to identify regardless of whether the aggravating situation “outweigh” the mitigating elements that the protection argued such as his start mother’s ingesting, his adoptive mother’s alleged failure to get him proper psychiatric care and his admission of guilt.
If they do, the jurors can then endorse a death sentence – but which is not demanded. A juror can overlook the weighing training and vote for lifetime out of mercy for Cruz.
A death sentence suggestion demands a unanimous vote on at the very least one particular target. If a single or a lot more jurors vote for lifestyle on all victims, that will be his sentence.
If the jury can’t unanimously agree that Cruz must be executed for at the very least 1 target, he will be sentenced to lifetime devoid of parole – Scherer can not overrule the jury. She could sentence him immediately or routine a future listening to.
After he is sentenced, the Florida Division of Corrections would assign him to a optimum protection jail where he would be section of the general population. McNeill, in her closing argument, alluded that could be an exceedingly perilous position for a person like Cruz.
