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.