Theatre shooter guilty of murder as U. S. jury rejects insanity plea
Colorado theatre shooter James Holmes was convicted Thursday in the chilling 2012 attack on defenceless moviegoers at a midnight Batman première after jurors swiftly rejected defence arguments that the former graduate student was insane and driven to murder by delusions.
The 27- year- old Holmes, who had been working toward his PhD in neuroscience, could get the death penalty for the massacre that left 12 people dead and dozens wounded.
The initial phase of Holmes’ trial took 11 weeks, but it only took jurors about 12 hours over a day and a half to decide all 165 charges. The same panel must now decide whether Holmes should pay with his life.
Dressed in a blue shirt and beige khakis, Holmes stood impassively as Judge Carlos Samour Jr. read charge after charge, each one punctuated by the word “guilty.”
The verdict came almost three years after Holmes, dressed head to-toe in body armour, slipped through the emergency exit of the darkened theatre in suburban Denver and replaced the Hollywood violence of the movie The Dark Knight Rises with real human carnage.
His victims included two activeduty servicemen, a single mom, a man celebrating his 27th birthday and an aspiring broadcaster who had survived a mall shooting in Toronto. Several died shielding friends or loved ones.
The trial offered a rare glimpse into the mind of a mass shooter, as most are killed by police, kill themselves or plead guilty.
Prosecutors argued that Holmes knew exactly what he was doing when he methodically gunned down strangers in the stadiumstyle theatre, taking aim at those who fled. They painted him as a calculated killer who sought to assuage his failures in school and romance with a mass murder that he believed would increase his personal worth.
He snapped photos of himself with fiery orange hair and scrawled his plans for the massacre in a spiral notebook he sent his university psychiatrist just hours before the attack, all in a calculated effort to be remembered, prosecutors said.
The prosecution called more than 200 witnesses over two months, more than 70 of them survivors, including some who were missing limbs.
That Holmes was the lone gunman was never in doubt. He was arrested in the parking lot as survivors were still fleeing, and he warned police he had rigged his nearby apartment into a potentially lethal booby trap, which he hoped would divert first responders from the theatre.