Facts and emotion take turns at trial of theater shooting
CENTENNIAL, Colo. — A clear pattern is emerging in the murder trial of Colorado movie theater shooter James Holmes.
Prosecutors are weaving dry facts into a powerful story, by alternating technical testimony with the graphic and emotional recollections of survivors.
“You’ve got a lot of scientific stuff, a lot of police action, things that can be very technical,” said Karen Steinhauser, a Denver defense attorney and former prosecutor. “What prosecutors are trying to do is make sure the emotional piece is played all the way through.”
Experts say this storytelling strategy could pay off months from now, when jurors finally begin deliberating. The prosecution wants them to believe two things: That Holmes was sane when he killed 12 people and injured 70 at a premiere of the Batman movie “The Dark Knight Rises,” and that the pain and suffering he caused requires a guilty verdict.
The defense hopes jurors will focus instead on Holmes’ mental state, and come away believing he was a schizophrenic in the grips of a psychotic episode so intense that he couldn’t tell right from wrong.
Because Holmes admits being the lone gunman, his defense attorneys haven’t cross-examined any of the victims, leaving their painful recollections uncontested.
“What the defense is trying to do is say, ‘Ignore that story because we admit it all,’ ” said Mark Caldwell, program development and resource director at the Boulder-based National Institute for Trial Advocacy, which teaches persuasive storytelling techniques.
District Attorney George Brauchler, who has been an instructor for the institute, established the pattern in his opening statement by mixing pictures of each of Holmes’ 12 victims with screen shots of text messages in which Holmes said he longed to kill people.
“Listening to his opening statement, it was clear he was using methods we teach,” Caldwell said.
Telling a story, rather than spinning out a chronology, has become standard advice in law schools, and many instructors point to the lengthy O.J. Simpson murder trial as an example of what prosecutors should avoid. By putting on three weeks of complex, technical DNA evidence, Simpson’s prosecutors “lost the jury. That evidence could have been put on in a couple of days,” Steinhauser said.
On the other hand, staggering the emotional with the factual makes sense, because otherwise, “this jury can get oversaturated with the immensity of this tragedy,” Denver defense attorney Craig Silverman said.
An FBI agent identified bag after bag of evidence Thursday. There was Holmes’ body armor and a helmet with strands of the dyed-orange hair he wore that night, and an arsenal of weapons, including a military-style assault rifle.
Another bag held two pink flip-flops, abandoned by someone fleeing in the chaos.
Prosecutor Karen Pearson piled them high on tables and then let jurors examine them before breaking for lunch.
Earlier this week, another FBI agent who explained how Holmes wired his apartment to cause a deadly explosion preceded tearful testimony by a gunshot victim who described losing sight of her children and stumbling over bodies in her panic to escape the theater.
Holmes faces 24 counts of murder and 140 counts of attempted murder, two for each person killed or wounded. If the state proves beyond a reasonable doubt he was sane, he could be executed or sentenced to life in prison.