SUSPECT PLEADS NOT GUILTY BY INSANITY
A man accused of a mass shooting at a Colorado supermarket in 2021 pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity Tuesday as a judge ruled the case can move to a trial following testimony giving new details of how he killed most of the 10 victims in just over a minute using a gun with a high-capacity magazine.
Attorneys for Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa entered the plea before District Court Judge Ingrid Bakke in Boulder. The plea means Alissa’s attorneys are claiming mental illness prevented him from understanding right from wrong on March 22, 2021, the day of the attack.
The hearing marked the first time prosecutors have spoken publicly about what happened at the crowded store in the college town of Boulder in the more than two years since the shooting, with the case stalled for much of the time after the suspect was deemed mentally incompetent.
New revelations Tuesday included that the suspect researched how to carry out a mass shooting by keeping notes on his iPhone for months beforehand about guns and how to move and shoot people. An investigator said he targeted moving people and kept shooting them until they were dead and had six high capacity magazines, which are illegal to possess in Colorado.
“This defendant came armed and ready to kill as many innocent defenseless and unarmed people as quickly as he could,” Prosecutor Michael Dougherty said. “He killed eight of them within 69 seconds. He was able to do that because of the large capacity magazines.”
The 24-year-old defendant was recently deemed competent to stand trial after being forcibly medicated so that he could understand the proceedings. Competency is a separate legal issue than sanity and focuses on Alissa’s mental condition now, rather than when the shooting occurred.
Clad in an orange and white striped jail uniform, Alissa looked down in court and at times at the judge as she advised him of his rights before his plea was entered. If successful, the plea could allow Alissa, who has been diagnosed with schizophrenia, to avoid prison and instead be committed indefinitely to the state mental hospital.
The perpetrator of a 2012 mass shooting at an Aurora, Colo., movie theater also pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity.
But jurors in that case rejected the plea and sentenced defendant James Holmes to life in prison for the murders of 12 people.
Alissa is charged with 10 counts of murder, 15 counts of attempted murder and other offenses in the shooting in Boulder, a college town about 30 miles northwest of Denver.
Neither his attorneys nor anyone else has disputed he was the gunman in the attack.