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 Challenge was named a finalist within the function writing class for “The Hardest Case for Mercy,” by contributor Joe Sexton.
The story gives an intimate and revelatory account of the hassle to spare the lifetime of Nikolas Cruz, the 19-year-old who killed 17 individuals at his former highschool in Parkland, Florida. It reveals for the primary time how his protection workforce 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 Challenge. “I’m pleased with the position The Marshall Challenge has performed over the previous decade in bringing this sort of deep, nuanced reporting in regards to the felony justice system to mild.”
That is the fourth time in its 10-year historical past that The Marshall Challenge has been named a Pulitzer finalist. The group has received two Pulitzer Prizes.
To inform this advanced story in painstaking element, Sexton performed intensive interviews with Cruz’s protection workforce and reviewed his medical, college, adoption and different data. He additionally spoke with Florida lawmakers and consulted specialists on fetal alcohol spectrum problems and capital circumstances earlier than the U.S. Supreme Court docket.
Guided by each private conviction and constitutional obligation, the authorized workforce had traced Cruz’s violent path again to his troubled beginning 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 workforce 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 workforce’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, reducing the brink 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 have been established in 1917 by the need of newspaper writer Joseph Pulitzer.
