Three years after the massacre, he will plead guilty.

The author of the 2018 shooting in a high school in Parkland, Florida, Nikolas Cruz, intends to plead guilty to the 17 murders, one of his lawyers announced on Friday during a hearing in a court in this state in the southeastern United States.

"We intend to change what we are going to plead (...) for all counts," said David Wheeler, whose 23-year-old client had initially pleaded not guilty.

This reversal is intended to avoid him the death penalty, even if the prosecutors indicated that there was no agreement in this direction as is sometimes the case.

The accused is expected to formalize his new guilty plea on Wednesday.

This would save him the first phase of a trial where a jury is charged to decide on guilt.

If prosecutors decided to request the death penalty, Nikolas Cruz would move directly to the second phase, with a jury tasked with deciding between life imprisonment and capital punishment.

In Florida, it suffices that a majority of jurors recommend the death penalty for the judge to be able to follow this recommendation, but not be forced to do so.

Mental disorders and fascination with guns

On Valentine's Day in 2018, Nikolas Cruz opened fire with an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, from which he had been expelled the previous year for "disciplinary reasons."

He killed 17 people and injured about 15 before being arrested.

Despite his psychiatric history, Nikolas Cruz was able to legally purchase an assault rifle.

He told investigators he heard voices urging him to "burn, kill, destroy".

His lawyers, however, never tried to plead insanity so that he could escape the death penalty.

The Parkland high school students had led an unprecedented mobilization movement for a more draconian limitation of arms sales in the United States.

The mobilization culminated on March 24, 2018 when the "March for our lives" had brought together 1.5 million people across the country, the largest national demonstration for better regulation of firearms in the history of the United States. United.

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