Accused Florida school shooter Nikolas Cruz kept his head bowed and his eyes on the floor during a brief court appearance Monday.
Dressed in a red prison jumpsuit with his wrists shackled at his waist, the 19-year-old — who is accused of slaughtering 17 people at his former high school last week — sat slumped at the defense table and refused to look even his own lawyers in the eye as they whispered instructions to him.
The hearing concerned a court filing his defense team is trying to keep sealed. Broward Circuit Court Judge Elizabeth Scherer didn’t say what was in the document, but agreed to keep it under wraps because, she said, “it deals solely with the defense’s access to their own client.”
State prosecutors protested that they believe “whatever the court is in possession of should be unsealed.”
Cruz’s sympathetic defense attorney, Melisa McNeill — who has described her client as a “broken child” who is “sorry” for the massacre — had tried to keep him out of court earlier Monday, saying it would create “an opportunity for the media to have a circus with him.”
But prosecutors said they wanted him there because they weren’t sure what was in the sealed document.
Cruz’s lawyers have said they’re hoping to offer a guilty plea in exchange for prosecutors taking the death penalty off the table.