Arguments outlined in Colo. shooting trial
Colorado theater gunman James Holmes’ sanity is a key issue in the slayings.
A prosecutor declared Monday that two psychiatric exams found Colorado theater gunman James Holmes to be sane as he meticulously plotted a mass murder, considering a bomb or biological warfare before settling on a shooting so that he could slaughter more people.
“Boom!” District Attorney George Brauchler said as he showed pictures of the victims and the weapons Holmes used to kill them on a TV screen. “Boom!” he repeated, describing in detail how bullets pierced organs and destroyed limbs.”
Holmes’ public defender, Daniel King, countered that 20 doctors who examined him in custody as well as the therapist who saw him before the shootings all agree he suffers from schizophrenia, a psychotic brain disease that skewed his thoughts
and compelled him to kill. “He was a good kid” who had no record of ever harming anyone before he had a psychotic delusion that compelled him to murder 12 people and wound 70 at a midnight “Batman” premiere nearly three years ago, King said.
Holmes has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. His defense hopes jurors will agree and have him committed to an institution as criminally insane for the rest of his life.
“Mental illness can sure sound like an excuse, but in this case, it’s not,” King said. “There will be no doubt in your minds that by the end of this trial, Mr. Holmes is severely mentally ill.”
Under Colorado law, Brauchler must prove Holmes was sane so that he will instead be executed or spend the rest of his life in prison.
“Through this door is horror. Through this door are bullets, blood, brains and bodies. Through this door, one guy who thought as if he had lost his career, lost his love life, lost his purpose, came to execute a plan,” said Brauchler, standing before a scale model of the theater.
“Four-hundred people came into a boxlike theater to be entertained, and one person came to slaughter them,” the prosecutor said.
Many more people would have died, but a magazine on his AR-15 assault rifle jammed, leaving 218 bullets unfired, Brauchler said.
Jurors must eventu- ally decide whether he was unable to know right from wrong because of a mental illness or defect when he slipped into the theater, unleashed tear gas and tried to empty his weapons on the crowd. He’s charged with 166 counts of fifirst- degree murder, attempted murder and an explosives offense for the mayhem he caused on July 20, 2012.
It remains one of America’s deadliest shootings, and that Holmes was the lone gunman has never been in doubt. He was arrested at the scene, along with an arsenal of weapons on his body and in his car.
Holmes sat quietly, harnessed to the floor by a cable that ran through his pants leg as the lawyers described his emotional rise and fall.
The prosecutor said the once-promising doctoral candidate told his ex-girlfriend that he had an “evil” plan “to kill people,” but she dismissed his threat as “theoretical.”