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 life of the Parkland school shooter.
The Pulitzer Prize Board announced Monday that The Marshall Project was named a finalist in the feature writing category for “The Hardest Case for Mercy,” by contributor Joe Sexton.
The story provides an intimate and revelatory account of the effort to spare the life of Nikolas Cruz, the 19-year-old who killed 17 people at his former high school in Parkland, Florida. It shows for the first time how his defense team dug into his troubled past and ultimately persuaded a jury to reject the death penalty.
“Sexton’s story is as haunting as it is humane,” said Geraldine Sealey, acting editor-in-chief of The Marshall Project. “I’m proud of the role The Marshall Project has played over the past decade in bringing this kind of deep, nuanced reporting about the criminal justice system to light.”
This is the fourth time in its 10-year history that The Marshall Project has been named a Pulitzer finalist. The organization has won two Pulitzer Prizes.
To tell this complex story in painstaking detail, Sexton conducted extensive interviews with Cruz’s defense team and reviewed his medical, school, adoption and other records. He also spoke with Florida lawmakers and consulted experts on fetal alcohol spectrum disorders and capital cases before the U.S. Supreme Court.
Guided by both personal conviction and constitutional duty, the legal team had traced Cruz’s violent path back to his troubled birth and years of undiagnosed illness. They worked with integrity and persistence despite public outrage over their work and the lasting emotional and physical toll the case took on their lives.
Neither the team nor the article shied away from the horror of Cruz’s crimes or the enduring pain of the victims’ families. But their work forced the jury — and now the wider public — to grapple with questions of justice, vengeance and mercy. The team’s work carried its own bitter irony: Their success in sparing Cruz’s life led to a rewriting of Florida’s death penalty statute, lowering the threshold for execution to the weakest in the nation.
The Pulitzer Prizes are awarded by Columbia University in New York City for excellence in journalism, arts and letters. They were established in 1917 through the will of newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer.
