Holmes moves closer to death penalty sentence
Jurors reject leniency for shooter
Jurors weighing James E. Holmes’ fate moved one step closer to sentencing him to death Monday when they ruled unanimously that the gunman in the Aurora, Colorado, mass shooting did not deserve leniency for killing 12 moviegoers and injuring 70 others.
Defense attorneys called a parade of family members, teachers, former neighbors and childhood friends over the course of four days to try to convince the panel of nine women and three men that the 27-year-old’s life should be spared.
They were unsuccessful. It took the jury just three hours to reach a verdict, and to move the sentencing portion of the trial into its third and final phase. In that phase, jurors will listen to victim impact statements and decide if he deserves death.
Holmes stood still and silent, his hands in the pockets of his khaki trousers, as Judge Carlos A. Samour Jr. read the jury’s decision as it pertained to each of the 12 slain victims. It took 10 minutes. Afterward, the judge polled each juror.
In the complicated calculus of the death penalty in Colorado, sentencing can be composed of up to three separate mini trials, complete with opening statements, witnesses, closing arguments and verdicts.
The first mini-trial concerned aggravating factors. Jurors quickly decided that Holmes was guilty of four aggravating factors when he swathed himself in body armor and blasted his way through the Century 16 multiplex during a midnight screening of “The Dark Knight Rises.”
The second part of the sentencing process, which just ended Monday, focused on mitigating factors, and whether they might serve as a basis for leniency for the failed neuroscience student.
Although they deliberated as a group, the jurors’ job was to decide individually if they believed that factors existed “in which fairness or mercy may be considered as extenuating or reducing the degree of the defendant’s moral culpability,” Samour explained.
These mitigating factors do not justify or excuse the murders, Samour told the jury at the beginning of this trial phase, but they “might serve as a basis for a sentence less than death.”
Once jurors decided whether there were reasons to be merciful, they had to weigh mitigation against the aggravating factors that made the crime so heinous.
On Monday, they decided that Holmes did not deserve a break. As a result, sentencing moves into its final phase, when jurors will hear from victims’ families and decide whether Holmes should live or die.