Filed
4:30 p.m. EDT
05.05.2025
Joe Sexton’s sweeping narrative ‘The Hardest Case for Mercy’ explored the efforts to spare the lifetime of the Parkland college shooter.
The Pulitzer Prize Board introduced Monday that The Marshall Venture was named a finalist within the characteristic writing class for “The Hardest Case for Mercy,” by contributor Joe Sexton.
The story gives an intimate and revelatory account of the trouble to spare the lifetime of Nikolas Cruz, the 19-year-old who killed 17 folks at his former highschool in Parkland, Florida. It exhibits for the primary time how his protection staff dug into his troubled previous and in the end persuaded a jury to reject the loss of life penalty.
“Sexton’s story is as haunting as it’s humane,” stated Geraldine Sealey, appearing editor-in-chief of The Marshall Venture. “I’m happy with the position The Marshall Venture has performed over the previous decade in bringing this type of deep, nuanced reporting concerning the legal justice system to mild.”
That is the fourth time in its 10-year historical past that The Marshall Venture has been named a Pulitzer finalist. The group has received two Pulitzer Prizes.
To inform this advanced story in painstaking element, Sexton performed in depth interviews with Cruz’s protection staff and reviewed his medical, college, adoption and different data. He additionally spoke with Florida lawmakers and consulted consultants on fetal alcohol spectrum issues and capital circumstances earlier than the U.S. Supreme Court docket.
Guided by each private conviction and constitutional obligation, the authorized staff had traced Cruz’s violent path again to his troubled delivery and years of undiagnosed sickness. They labored with integrity and persistence regardless of public outrage over their work and the lasting emotional and bodily toll the case took on their lives.
Neither the staff nor the article shied away from the horror of Cruz’s crimes or the enduring ache of the victims’ households. However their work pressured the jury — and now the broader public — to grapple with questions of justice, vengeance and mercy. The staff’s work carried its personal bitter irony: Their success in sparing Cruz’s life led to a rewriting of Florida’s loss of life penalty statute, decreasing the edge for execution to the weakest within the nation.
The Pulitzer Prizes are awarded by Columbia College in New York Metropolis for excellence in journalism, arts and letters. They had been established in 1917 by way of the need of newspaper writer Joseph Pulitzer.
