Cinema shooter’s sanity key to trial

Colorado’s long-awaited cinema massacre trial began yesterday, with jurors asked to decide whether gunman James Holmes was insane when he killed a dozen filmgoers in 2012, or a calculating mass murderer who deserves execution.

Public defenders trying to spare the life of the one-time neuroscience graduate student, and prosecutors seeking the death penalty, presented their opening statements to the court, on the outskirts of Denver yesterday.

Holmes, aged 27, has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity to killing 12 people and wounding 70 inside a midnight screening of the Batman film The Dark Knight Rises. He was armed with a handgun, shotgun, and semi-automatic rifle.

Arapahoe County District Court Judge Carlos Samour said he expects the trial to take four months.

Lawyers for Holmes, who is charged with multiple counts of first-degree murder and attempted murder, concede he was the lone gunman but have said the California native was in the throes of a psychotic episode when he plotted and carried out the attack.

He has undergone two court-ordered sanity examinations since his arrest that produced hours of video and piles of documents. According to court papers, they provided conflicting results. He has been hospitalised at least twice since his arrest, once for an apparent self-inflicted head injury

Former Colorado prosecutor Bob Grant said the government must lay out for jurors the horror of the July night when Holmes, dressed in a gas mask, helmet, and body armour, lobbed a teargas canister into the screening at Aurora’s Century 16 multiplex, then opened fire.

Holmes appeared in court days after the rampage looking disoriented, and with his hair dyed orange.

“They will try to put the jury in those theatre seats,” said Grant, who prosecuted the only death-row inmate executed in Colorado in nearly 50 years. The state’s prosecutors rarely seek the death penalty, and it has just three inmates on death row.

Holmes, who graduated with honours from the University of California, has no criminal record. He had been courted by neuroscience doctoral programmes, but withdrew from a graduate program at the University of Colorado’s Anschutz Medical Campus before the attack.

Holmes’ public defenders will focus throughout the trial on his mental state.

“The defence theme from the get-go will be that as a civilized society, we don’t put mentally ill people to death,” said long-time criminal defence lawyer Mark Johnson.

Reuters