Tag: aurora shooting
James Holmes Moves Closer To Death Penalty As Jurors Reject Leniency

James Holmes Moves Closer To Death Penalty As Jurors Reject Leniency

By Maria L. La Ganga and Tina Susman, Los Angeles Times (TNS)

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, Colo., mass shooting did not deserve leniency for killing 12 movie-goers and injuring 70 others.

Defense attorneys called a parade of family members, elementary school 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 Holmes 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.

There were no audible outbursts from the courtroom. “You must observe proper courtroom decorum,” Samour said before the verdict was announced. “I am sensitive to the fact that this case may evoke powerful emotions,” he added.

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.” Among the factors in the July 23 decision were that he killed more than two people and lay in wait to ambush his victims.

The second part of the sentencing process, which just ended Monday, focused on mitigating factors, and whether they might serve as a basis for lenience 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. That’s when jurors will hear from victims’ families and decide whether Holmes should live or die. This phase is scheduled to begin Tuesday.

The most gripping testimony during the mitigation phase came from Holmes’ parents, who had made only limited public statements since the massacre in 2012.

But jurors were not swayed by his mother’s tearful protestations: “He never harmed anyone, ever, ever, until July 20, 2012,” Arlene Rosemary Holmes testified. “I understand he has a serious mental illness. He didn’t ask for that. Schizophrenia chose him. He didn’t choose it.”

Nor were they moved by Robert Holmes’ comments from the witness stand.

Defense attorney Tamara Brady: “Is James Holmes your son?”

Robert Holmes: “Yes he is … ”

Brady: “Do you still love him?”

Holmes: “Yes I do.”

Brady: “Why?”

Holmes: “He’s my son. We got along pretty well. He’s an excellent kid.”

Colorado has carried out only one execution since 1976, and its death row has just three inmates, compared to California’s, with 743. Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper has said he will not sign a death warrant while he is in office.

However, a Quinnipiac University Poll of 1,231 voters released July 27 found that Coloradans favor the death penalty for Holmes 2-1.

(c)2015 Los Angeles Times. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

File photo: James Holmes sits in court for an advisement hearing at the Arapahoe County Justice Center in Centennial, Colorado June 4, 2013. REUTERS/Andy Cross/Pool

We Simply Sit And Wait For The Next Massacre

We Simply Sit And Wait For The Next Massacre

Such troubled young men.

This is what we call them instead of nuts with guns, and they are a dreaded modern American cliché. Every time there’s a newsflash about another mass shooting, we now expect the culprit to be revealed as a “troubled young man.”

The murders at a Louisiana movie theater on Thursday were unusual because the gunman was in his 50s. The typical mass killer is much younger.

His family is always stunned by his crime. So are the few friends he has. And in the days following the massacre we always learn more about his loneliness and disillusion, and of course the ludicrous ease with which he was able to arm himself.

The story has become, after so many horrid tragedies, a fill-in-the-blank exercise.

In the hours after 24-year-old Mohammod Abdulazeez killed five U.S. servicemembers in Chattanooga, Tennessee, the media frothed with speculation that he was working under the jihadist direction — or, at least, inspiration — of ISIS.

Now it appears he was a messed-up kid who drank too much booze, smoked too much weed, and spent too much money. Oh, he was also depressed.

FBI agents believe Abdulazeez began exploring Islamic radicalism as his money problems worsened, and his mental condition frayed. Shortly before his shooting spree, he searched the Internet for guidance as to whether martyrdom would absolve a person’s sins.

Evidently he found a website or a chat room that seeded this loony brainstorm, and sent him down the path of mass murder. Getting the firepower was, as always, no problem.

Ironically, the day Abdulazeez died after shooting four Marines and a Navy sailor, a jury in Denver was deliberating what to do about another troubled young man.

His name is James Eagan Holmes, age 27. In July 2012 he shot up a packed theater during a Batman movie, killing a dozen people and wounding 70 more.

His lawyers insisted Holmes was insane, which is certainly true. Jurors went ahead and convicted him of all 12 murders, of which he is certainly guilty.

Holmes has Phi Beta Kappa intelligence — a degree, with honors, in neuroscience — but was also deeply disturbed from a young age. Some described him as obsessed with the topic of murder, and speaking openly of wanting to kill people.

And kill he did, first loading up on heavy-duty firearms at Gander Mountain and Bass Pro Shops — two Glock pistols, a Remington “tactical” shotgun, and a Smith & Wesson assault-style semiautomatic rifle. The 6,000-plus rounds of ammunition Holmes purchased online.

See, he passed the background checks. So don’t look for any blood on the hands of the retailers that armed him.

The gun laws being what they are in this country, the transition from “troubled” to “homicidal” is a breeze. What feeble screening there is can’t be counted on to stop young men on bloodbath missions.

Dylann Roof, age 21, shouldn’t have been able to buy the .45-caliber handgun he used to murder nine black people in a church in Charleston, South Carolina, last month.

A federal background check should have flagged him, because Roof had been arrested on felony drug charges and had admitted to possessing a controlled substance. The FBI has three business days to check if gun buyers have criminal records or drug issues, but the time expired while the agency was trying to gain access to the police report on Roof.

Because of a loophole in the law, the gun store was able to sell Roof the weapon because the three-day waiting period ended without an FBI response. “We’re all sick this happened,” FBI director James B. Comey said.

Sick is the word for it. Thousands of ineligible applicants for gun ownership have bought weapons over the counter, thanks to that loophole. Big surprise — some of those weapons were later used in violent crimes, according to the Justice Department.

So, Dylann Roof, eccentric loner and budding white supremacist, took his 21st birthday money and got himself a Glock, with which he executed nine innocent persons.

But not before posing for a photo — the gun in one hand, a Confederate flag in the other. The image tells much about this pathetic, unraveled soul.

Even if the gun shop had refused to sell Roof that pistol, he could have gotten another. Black-market weapons are available on the streets of Charleston, as they are in all American cities.

For a troubled man, young or old, finding kinship for your hate is only a mouse-click away. Finding guns is just as easy. It’s the same sick story over and over.

And all we do is wait for the next one.

(Carl Hiaasen is a columnist for The Miami Herald. Readers may write to him at: 1 Herald Plaza, Miami, FL, 33132.)

Photo: Investigators stand outside a movie theater where a man shot and killed filmgoers in Lafayette, Louisiana on July 24, 2015. REUTERS/Lee Celano

Aurora Shooter Found Guilty Of 1st Degree Murder

Aurora Shooter Found Guilty Of 1st Degree Murder

A Colorado jury found James Holmes guilty of first-degree murder, rejecting Holmes’ insanity plea.

In July of 2012, Holmes, now 27, entered a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, walked into a sold out midnight screening of The Dark Knight Rises, tossed a tear gas canister into the crowd and began spraying the audience with bullets. He murdered 12 moviegoers, and injured 70 others. He had also placed explosives in his apartment in an apparent effort to injure and kill law enforcement.

The penalty phase of the trial is set to begin on Monday.

Photo: REUTERS/R.J. Sangosti/Pool  

James Holmes’ Notebook: Opposing Views Of Aurora Shooter’s Mindset

James Holmes’ Notebook: Opposing Views Of Aurora Shooter’s Mindset

By Maria L. La Ganga, Los Angeles Times (TNS)

Day 18 of the Aurora, Colorado, shooting trial was an exercise in the old adage: The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.

The book quoted Tuesday from the witness stand in Division 201 of the Arapahoe County Justice Center, however, was not the Bible. Instead, it was an unassuming brown notebook with a metal spiral along its spine and the musings of a mass killer inside.

James Holmes, who is on trial for his life, has acknowledged shooting 12 moviegoers to death and severely wounding 70 others in a Denver suburb on July 20, 2012, in one of the worst mass shootings in American history. He has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity to the 166 charges against him.

The prosecution is about halfway through its case against the 27-year-old. More than 150 witnesses have testified, and jurors have heard four weeks of alternating heartbreak and tedium.

Victims have described watching loved ones die, seeing their own limbs shattered, being covered in other people’s blood. Tech experts have testified in mind-numbing detail about IP addresses, how PayPal works and how credit card information lives online.

Jurors have wiped away tears; at least one has been admonished to stay awake.

Holmes’ mental state is the central question facing jurors, and Arapahoe County District Attorney George H. Brauchler has suggested that it would probably be broached this week by those most knowledgeable about it_the psychiatrists and psychologists who have examined the defendant.

But first prosecutors introduced the key piece of evidence in the case: P-TR-341.

Also known as Holmes’ personal notebook, it is full of the shooter’s chilling plans to kill innocent people, his incomprehensible musings about life, death and everything in between, and six pages scrawled with a single word, over and over, larger and larger. “Why.”

Judge Carlos A. Samour Jr. ruled that Aurora Police Sgt. Matthew Fyles was not allowed to simply read all 29 pages of notes and diagrams aloud in court Tuesday. Instead, jurors were given copies of the document to read after Fyles testified about the journal.

Prosecutor Karen Pearson walked the sergeant through a description of the book and then asked him to read specially chosen sections.

First Fyles quoted from Holmes’ deliberations about how best to kill the most people. Biological weapons require too much knowledge, Holmes wrote; serial killing, too much contact with victims; and bombs are too well regulated.

The upshot? “‘Mass murder/spree,'” Fyles read. “‘Check mark.'”

Then Fyles read the notebook section about how Holmes chose his target: “‘Venue,'” Fyles read, “‘airport or movie theater.’ Then it says ‘airport’ with an X. ‘Substantial security. Too much of a terrorist history. Terrorism isn’t the message.

“‘The message is, there is no message. Most fools will misinterpret correlation for causation, namely, relationship and work failures as causes. Both were expediting catalysts, not the reason. Causation being my state of mind for the past 15 years.'”

In an effort to convince the jury that Holmes was a thoughtful and sane killer, Pearson also had Fyles read sections about how Holmes methodically considered various theaters in the Century 16 cineplex for his massacre.

The shooter weighed them for their closeness to parking, Fyles told the jury, how inconspicuous Holmes would be while shooting, and how he could “‘lock double doors, inflicting more casualties.'”

And then she asked Fyles to read from page 53 of Holmes’ notebook, a kind of notes-to-self section, a terrifying to-do list: “Buy stun gun and folding knife. Research firearm laws and mental illness. Buy handgun … acquire remote detonation equipment and body armor. Practicing shooting at Byers Canyon Rifle Range.”

Pearson did not have Fyles read the very next sentence.

Instead, defense attorney Daniel King chose to read it himself, after pointing out just how much of the rambling document Pearson had ignored.

The point, of course, is that Pearson’s segments emphasized a cool planner; King’s segments showed a man so sick he did not know the consequences of his actions.

(c)2015 Los Angeles Times. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

FILE – In this Monday, July 23, 2012 file photo, James Holmes, accused of killing 12 people in Friday’s shooting rampage in an Aurora, Colo., movie theater, appears in Arapahoe County District Court with defense attorney Tamara Brady in Centennial, Colo. With their anger and tears stirred by the sight of Holmes in a courtroom with red hair and glassy eyes, the families of those killed in the Colorado theater massacre now must go home to plan their final goodbyes. (AP Photo/Denver Post, RJ Sangosti, Pool, File)