Nikolas Cruz would have been the youngest, most destructive inmate on Florida's death row

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

45% : The same 1920s-era electric chair was used in 1979 when John Spenkelink became the first in Florida and the second in the nation to be executed after the high court upheld the death penalty in 1974.
43% :  The death penalty was suspended in Florida in 1964 while the U.S. Supreme Court debated its constitutionality.
39% : In 2000, The Palm Beach Post estimated Florida was spending $51 million a year more on enforcing the death penalty compared with the costs of housing all first-degree murderers serving life sentences.
39% : "I'm invoking my right of free will to choose execution by electrocution due to confliction (sic) surrounding executions through lethal injection," he explained in a handwritten affidavit.

*Our bias meter rating uses data science including sentiment analysis, machine learning and our proprietary algorithm for determining biases in news articles. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. The rating is an independent analysis and is not affiliated nor sponsored by the news source or any other organization.