Jury selection to start for theatre killer
DENVER: Jury selection starts on Tuesday for James Holmes, the man charged with multiple counts of murder and attempted murder in the July 20, 2012, shootings at a Denver-area movie theatre showing The Dark Knight Rises, in which 12 people were killed and 70 were injured. Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty.
Mr Holmes pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. His attorneys have acknowledged he was the gunman but say he is mentally ill and was gripped by a psychotic episode when he opened fire on a theatre in the Denver suburb of Aurora, where more than 400 people were watching a midnight showing of The Dark Knight Rises.
Colorado law defines insanity as the inability to know right from wrong because of a mental illness or defect. The jury will make that determination based on evidence presented at the trial, including two courtordered sanity evaluations at the Colorado Mental Health Institute at Pueblo.
The law sets no minimum time that people must remain in the state hospital after being found not guilty by reason of insanity, except to say they can’t ask for a release hearing in the first 180 days.
Patients who show progress can be granted a measure of independence, ranging from supervised movement around the hospital grounds through off-campus visits to uncondi-tional release.
To qualify for unconditional release, Mr Holmes would have to convince the hospital and the courts that he is no longer a threat to the public for the reasonably foreseeable future — the standard for release set by Colorado law.
That would be a tough case for Mr Holmes to make, said Karen Steinhauser, a former Denver prosecutor who is now a defence attorney.
State records show the vast majority of people granted off-hospital-grounds privileges after being found not guilty of murder because of insanity were charged with killing someone they knew, usually a family member. Although the available court records are often sketchy, in some cases the insanity defendants believed the victim was somehow tormenting them.
Mr Holmes, by contrast, is charged with a brutal attack on complete strangers.
“The issue is going to be, how do we know that this person no longer has that type of mental disorder that could cause him to go to a different place, to a different community, to a different area and do the same thing?’’ said Ms Steinhauser, who isn’t involved in the Holmes case. It would be nearly impossible for Mr Holmes to convince a judge he was no longer a danger to himself or others, she said.
John Hinckley, who was found not guilty by reason of insanity in the 1981 shootings of President Ronald Reagan and three others, has been committed to a psychiatric hospital for 32 years. Hospital officials have said his mental illness has been in remission for decades, and he spends more than half of each month at his mother’s home.