CENTENNIAL — Over 11 weeks and 256 witnesses, the Aurora movie theater shooting trial has stirred together deep heartbreak and scientific inquiry to answer one question.
Beginning Wednesday — two years, 11 months and 25 days after the attack — jurors finally will start to try to resolve whether James Holmes was sane when he shot and killed 12 people and wounded 70. But first, prosecutors and defense attorneys will have one last chance to make their respective cases during closing arguments on Tuesday. Deliberations begin Wednesday.
The two hours each side is allotted for closings could be pivotal, said Dan Recht, a Denver defense attorney and legal analyst. Both sides will seek to sum up hundreds of hours of testimony and thousands of pieces of evidence, tying them together into a coherent story that helps jurors navigate the legal morass before them.
Prosectors, who have the burden of proving sanity beyond a reasonable doubt, probably will remind jurors of the detailed planning that went into the attack and , Recht said. Defense attorneys, while acknowledging the shooting’s tragedy, will argue that Holmes was so mentally ill that he was incapable of knowing right from wrong.
Both sides probably will use visual aids — charts, photos and video clips — as they try one final time to embed their arguments into jurors’ minds.
“There’s an art to it,” Recht said of closing arguments. “And we’ll see which side is good at it.”
Here is a breakdown of the main points prosecutors and defense attorneys are likely to highlight during closings:
Prosecution
Sanity: Two court-appointed forensic psychiatrists, Jeff Metzner and almost a year apart. Both found that Holmes has severe mental illness but was legally sane at the time of the attack, something prosecutors will almost certainly stress. Holmes’ classmates and professors from his neuroscience graduate program at the University of Colorado testified that Holmes was socially awkward but smart. While he struggled in his lab rotations, he continued to excel in his classes. In addition to Holmes’ academic performance, prosecutors routinely emphasized his uninterrupted ability to continue to care for himself, shop at the grocery store and pay his bills up until the day of the attack.
Planning: Hours before the attack, Holmes mailed a notebook to Dr. Lynne Fenton, a CU psychiatrist who had treated him. In the notebook, Holmes weighed his options for committing a mass murder and described his surveillance of the theater complex and his reasons for selecting Theater 9. Prosecutors also spent days during the trial detailing the weapons, ammunition and body armor that Holmes amassed, and they called multiple investigators to explain the elaborate system of explosives found in Holmes’ apartment — all signs, prosecutors contend, that Holmes was sane.
Emotion: Prosecutors called 222 witnesses during the 34 days it took to present their case. Only a handful of those days did not involve one of the 78 survivors they called to the stand. Throughout their case, prosecutors threaded heartbreaking accounts of what happened inside the theater with the often-complicated, dry testimony of experts. While that emotional testimony doesn’t speak directly to Holmes’ sanity and the judge has instructed jurors that they cannot make decisions out of sympathy for the victims, prosecutors presented the victims’ stories to show jurors why the case is so significant — something legal experts say will weigh on the jury in deliberations.
Defense
Delusions: Defense attorneys called two psychiatrists they hired to evaluate Holmes. and Dr. Raquel Gur testified they believe Holmes was legally insane at the time of the attack. The experts said he was engulfed in delusional thinking and did not have the capacity to distinguish right from wrong. He believed in a theory he created called “Human Capital,” in which he could increase his self-worth by killing others. Defense attorneys are expected to highlight bizarre aspects of Holmes’ notebook — such as the series of pages in which he wrote “Why?” over and over again — and also make reference to Holmes’ behavior after his arrest, during which he sat restlessly in a police interrogation room and at one point tried to stick a staple into a power outlet.
Lifelong illness:All four psychiatrists who evaluated Holmes diagnosed him with varying forms of schizophrenia. Holmes’ illness began to manifest at a young age, and he told different doctors he began having intrusive thoughts of suicide and killing people while he was in middle school. Shortly before the attack, Fenton and another psychiatrist at CU noted they were concerned Holmes was nearing a nervous breakdown. And defense attorneys spent hours during trial questioning deputies from the Arapahoe County jail, where they say Holmes suffered a psychotic break four months after the attack. Defense attorneys argue that was an outward manifestation of the mental illness that drove Holmes to commit the shooting.
Mitigation: When questioning the psychiatrists who examined Holmes after the shooting, defense attorneys got the doctors to say that — whether Holmes was sane or insane — the shooting wouldn’t have happened if Holmes weren’t mentally ill. That’s not necessarily enough to win a verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity, but it highlights the different approach the defense has to the case. While prosecutors must take the case step by step, the defense can take the long view, hoping to convince just one juror to spare its client’s life — prosecutors are seeking the death penalty if Holmes is convicted. That means the defense will try to use its closing arguments to appeal for understanding, even if it isn’t enough to stop jurors from voting guilty at this stage of the case.
John Ingold: 303-954-1068, jingold@denverpost.com or twitter.com/johningold
