James Holmes: Prosecutors seek death penalty for Colorado shooter
The man accused of killing 12 cinema-goers during a midnight screening of a Batman film in Colorado last year faces execution if he is convicted of their murders.
James Holmes is accused of killing 12 people in a crowded cinema in July last year Photo: AP/Getty Images
By Jon Swaine, New York 5:03PM BST 01 Apr 2013
Prosecutors have confirmed that they will seek the death penalty for James Holmes, the 25-year-old graduate school dropout who has been charged with carrying out the massacre in Aurora last July.
“It is my intent that justice for James Eagan Holmes is death,” George Brauchler, the district attorney for Arapahoe County, told a court hearing in Centennial, 15 miles south of the Century cinema.
Holmes would become the first criminal executed in Colorado since 1997, and only the second in the past 46 years. Politicians in the state voted narrowly against repealing capital punishment last week.
He is accused of committing 12 counts of first-degree murder and wounding 58 other people when he allegedly walked into the screening wearing body armour, set off smoke bombs, and opened fire.
Mr Brauchler, who last week rejected a plea deal for Holmes to plead guilty and serve a life sentence, said he had made his decision after speaking to more than 800 victims and their family members.
If Holmes is convicted of the murder charges by the jury in his trial, he will then face a separate court proceeding in which prosecutors will try to persuade the same jurors that he deserves to be executed.
While they are likely to argue that the number of alleged victims justifies the death penalty, Holmes’s lawyers could counter that his mental state means that a sentence of life in prison would be suitable.
Holmes’s lawyers have said he is mentally ill and that they are considering mounting a defence of insanity. This would prompt a thorough mental assessment of the alleged gunman, which could delay his trial by several months. He could be committed to a secure mental institution indefinitely if such a defence were successful.
After surrendering to police at the scene of the massacre, he appeared dazed in his first court appearance last year. He was held for several days in a psychiatric ward after being classified as a danger to himself, his lawyers state.
Prosecutors allege, however, that detailed preparations made by Holmes before the July 20 massacre, such as booby-trapping his flat and buying weaponry and armour, prove that it was premeditated. Mr Brauchler described Holmes’s offer of a plea deal as a publicity stunt.
“The defendant knows he is guilty, the defence attorneys know he is guilty, and both of them know that he was not criminally insane,” he argued in a court filing last week.
While not mentioning Holmes by name, last weekend the prosecutor wrote an article in the Denver Post, the region’s biggest newspaper, arguing in favour of maintaining the death penalty in Colorado.
He pointed to last December’s primary school massacre in Connecticut, and to the 1995 bombings of Oklahoma City, as cases in which execution was a fitting punishment.
“Repealing the death penalty would result in acts similar to those in Newtown, or the acts of Tim McVeigh being punished no differently than a single murder of one gang member by another,” Mr Brauchler wrote. “Each murder after the first would be a freebie.”
